Lady on a dark background.

This group of four engravings made in Bordeaux, the last ones Goya executed, constitute a mini-series called "Last Caprices" or "New Caprices" (a term coined by Eleanor Sayre), although they have nothing to do with the series of 1799. They have been considered part of an unfinished series, or else single works complementary to the drawing albums produced in Bordeaux (and in particular Album H). Perhaps these prints are the "best ideas" to which Goya alludes in a letter to his friend Joaquín María Ferrer, exiled in Paris, dated 1825, in response to the latter's suggestion to reprint the Caprices.

A good technical mastery can be appreciated, as well as the mixture of delicacy and vigour, despite the artist's advanced age. Some authors have pointed out the possible influence of the simultaneous practice of lithography, as the traces of the strokes and profiles are softer than in his earlier etchings.

Similar compositions are engraved on the backs of the plates, open only to etching and which seem to be copies of three drawings from Album H (nos. 22, 31 and 58) which served as a reference for the compositions on the front. Two of these reverses, Lady on a light background. (reverse of Lady on a dark background.) and The Embossed Man (idem of Andalusian Smuggler ), are unanimously considered to have been executed by another hand, and there are doubts about the third, Old Woman Swinging (idem of Old Man Swinging).

Only period proofs of Old Man Swinging and The Blind Singer survive, while only posthumous prints exist of Lady on a Dark Background and Andalusian Smuggler. Except for the plate of The Blind Singer, which belonged to Paul Lefort, the others were acquired in 1859 from Mariano Goya by the English diplomat John Savile Lumley, who asked the Calcografía Nacional to print the front and back of his three plates, except for Andalusian Smuggler, due to the poor condition of the plate. 

In 1926 the three plates were acquired by the firm of Colnaghi (London), who made an edition at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, using different types of antique and modern paper. In 1938 the plates passed to Philip Hofer (Cambridge, Massachusetts), for whom Ture Bengtz made a print in 1954 and Russell T. Limbach another in 1960. Hofer finally donated the plates in 1970 to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where they are now kept. In 1971 Eleanor Sayre published a catalogue raisonné and twenty-five copies of that edition included a numbered edition of six prints (obverse and reverse) by Emiliano Sorini (New York).