In 1895, Elena Brockmann, a painter from Madrid who had studied first at the Academy of San Fernando and later under Joaquín Sorolla in Rome, became the first Spanish woman to submit a history painting to a National Exhibition. Three years earlier she had presented this costumbrista painting, in which a large number of figures are shown in a space with marked perspective. Her ambitious compositions, her life studies and her energetic brushwork made her one of the few women artists who successfully overcame the conventionalisms associated with her gender.