The young girl is drawn with a scraper in the sugar, before the acid bath. The scraper has cut into the copper. By omitting the step of degreasing the copper, Picasso obtains an abstract, wet and deep texture of the background in this print.

Femmes en prison, en pensant à Goya is part of the series of prints made between 16 March and 5 October 1968. This series, the largest in the artist's body of work, was shown in December at the Louise Leiris Gallery and later at the Art Institute of Chicago. The title of the exhibition, "Three hundred and forty-seven engravings", gave its name to the corpus, which is also known, more simply, as "the 347".

Isolated in the calm of Mougins, the painter, already 86 years old, concentrated on this project with a sustained rhythm of work to the point of paroxysm. His imagination took flight in a series where all the themes dear to Picasso are present: the circus, the woman, the painter and his model. Always mindful of the history of art, where he is already aware of having become a canonical artist, references to Rembrandt, with whom he rivals in engraving, El Greco, Goya and Velazquez, as well as Ingres and Manet are present. The 347 give the vision of an existence devoted to desire and sensual pleasure. In his plates, acrobats cross paths with bourgeois and aristocrats in brothels or the circus, in the artist's studio, a world where eroticism is omnipresent. At this time Picasso began to rework the works of his Old Masters. 

"Femmes en prison", with its cold, dramatic light, is reminiscent of the dark compositions of Goya. The effect is made even stronger by the use of the sugar aquatint technique, allowing thick, grainy textures on the copper surface. Picasso leaves the copper intentionally greased, the final effect giving the impression of a still wet layer.