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
Romanticism in Spanish literature a talent for poetry. She married an American diplomat and lived in various foreign countries. Family misfortune prompted her to seek solitude and retreat in Lisbon, where she died in 1911. Her most important work is "Poesías" (1852). During the Romantic period, there was a great interest in literary fiction, in particular, adventure and mystery novels; however, Spanish output of this type was scanty, limited to translations of foreign novels. More than a thousand translations circulated in Spain before 1850, in the historic, romantic, chivalrous, and melodramatic genres, representing writers such as Alexandre Dumas, père, Chateaubriand, Walter Scott, and Victor