Arrived in Rome in 1858 with a pensioner from the Diputació de Barcelona, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal specialized in the Eternal City, before to bond with the merchant Adolphe Goupil and establish himself on the international market with eighteenth-century costume paintings and genre scenes, made with surprising technique and immediately imitated by a host of Italian and Spanish painters, who gave birth to the phenomenon of fortunism. A versatile artist, he demonstrated the same dexterity and skill in etching, practiced occasionally, as in painting. His deep knowledge of the great masters of the past led him to confront himself in this field with Rembrandt and, above all, with Goya, explicitly mentioned in some works. The diffusion of Fortuny's engravings is largely due to Goupil, who in 1869 was selling a portfolio of eight etchings. In 1878, four years after the artist's death, the number of engravings published by the merchant, in various formats, techniques and types of paper, rose to twenty-eight.