María Josefa Pimentel, Duchess of Osuna who became patrons of the painter Francisco de Goya. The Duchess not only purchased one of the first editions of "Los Caprichos", but also commissioned a series of cabinet paintings on the subject of witchcraft from Goya, amongst them "El aquelarre" ("Witches' Sabbath"). In the famous portrait Goya painted of her, she is shown standing with noble reserve, and dressed according to the fashion initiated by Queen Marie Antoinette in Paris at that time. In another famous painting, Goya portrayed the ducal family. The Duchess was interested in landscape gardening and from the 1780s she developed a garden at El
Witches' Sabbath Witches' Sabbath The Witches' Sabbath is a term applied to a gathering of those considered to practice witchcraft and other rites. Prior to the late 19th century, it is difficult to locate any English use of the term 'sabbath' to denote a gathering of witches. The phrase is used by Henry Charles Lea's in his History of the Inquisition (1888). Writing in 1900, German historian Joseph Hansen who was a correspondent and a German translator of Lea's work, frequently uses the shorthand phrase "hexensabbat" to interpret medieval trial records, though any consistently recurring term is noticeably rare in the copious