Young woman with small hat on her forehead

This drawing is conventionally presented as the first in Notebook A or Album A, also known as the Sanlúcar Album because, according to Vicente Carderera (1860), it was a notebook that Goya began during a journey in the company of the famous Duchess of Alba, Doña María Teresa de Silva, when the noble lady left for Andalusia... and settled for a time in her stately villa of San Lúcar de Barrameda.

It is not easy to pinpoint the reasons for Goya's trip to Andalusia and, in particular, to this town in Cádiz, although we have several pieces of information that allow us to give some chronological details of when it took place:

In February 1796 José Álvarez de Toledo, 13th Duke of Alba, travelled from Madrid to Andalusia to attend to the affairs of his estates. Towards the end of May the Duke fell seriously ill in Seville. On learning of his illness, his wife, the Duchess Mª Teresa Cayetana de Silva, left Madrid and was still able to attend to him in his last days. He died on 9 June 1796. A few days later the widowed Duchess retired to her possessions in Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz), where she remained until 1799. At the same time, there are several reports of Goya's stay in Andalusia, the duration and reasons for which have not been sufficiently clarified. It seems that in June 1796 he was in Seville and then in Sanlúcar, as evidenced by the testimony of the sculptor Joaquín Arali when, in a letter of 22 July sent to the scholar Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, he asked him to give Goya his memoirs, if he was there [in Seville] on his way back from San Lúcar. At the end of December and beginning of January 1797 Goya remained in Andalusia. At that time he was suffering from an illness in Cadiz and received visits from the writer Nicolás Fernández de Moratín and the merchant Sebastián Martínez. Goya is first recorded as having returned to Madrid on 1 April 1797, when he resigned from the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts because of ill health.

Carderera's commentary and the other facts expressed, as well as the informal air that emanates from Notebook A, consolidated the historiographical tradition that his drawings were born in the quiet atmosphere of the small court and servants who accompanied the Duchess of Alba to her possessions in Sanlúcar in the summer of 1796. More extreme interpretations came to consider these drawings as one of the testimonies to the romance that, according to legend, Goya had had with her.

The documentary contributions and the review of the whole matter by Mena and Mühle-Maurer have led, however, to consider a different context and chronology for the Notebook A, which could date back to 1794 (or even 1793), well before Goya's trip to Andalusia, his second since his previous stay in 1793. Goya was in the service of the Duke and Duchess of Alba from at least August 1794, when it is recorded that he had already been commissioned to paint the portrait of The Duchess of Alba in White, which he painted in 1795, as well as the two small paintings depicting the Duchess's domestic surroundings entitled The Duchess of Alba and the Beata and The Beata and the children María de Luz and Luisito Berganza. These were surroundings in which Goya may have had the opportunity to take notes about the Duchess herself, as drawings A.a, A.f and A.q suggest. As for other drawings in the album depicting young women in casual poses, far from being girls from Cádiz or representing the Duchess's servants in Sanlúcar, as has been repeatedly written, they may plausibly have been inspired by taverns or brothels in Madrid. On the other hand, Notebook A shows an undoubted continuity with the first block of drawings in Notebook B, the origin of which is also thought to date from the same chronological period. 

In the same way, it is now thought that the creative process of The Caprices may have begun in 1794, earlier than is usually supposed, some of whose engravings offer clear correspondences with drawings from the notebooks (especially A.j, A.n and A.p.) and B.

After Goya's death, Notebook A passed to his son Javier (1828) and to his grandson Mariano (1854). It was then dismembered and the separate sheets began to be dispersed. Some were in the possession of Valentín Carderera in 1860.

At the present time only eight sheets of the safe notebook are known, worked on both sides, giving a total of sixteen drawings (A.a-A.p). They lack original numbering, so it is impossible to establish their correlation. There is also a sheet with two other drawings that could be copies by Carderera (A.q-A.r) and three more drawings that are known exclusively as copies (A, copies a, b and c).

Drawing A.a, the first of those catalogued, belonged to Carderera and in 1867 passed to the National Library of Spain.