Eine Frau und zwei Kinder an einem Brunnen

In 1786 Goya finally landed the post he had been angling for, painter to the king, which mostly meant supplying designs to the royal tapestry works outside Madrid. Their weavers did not want grand history. They wanted pleasant everyday scenes to hang in the apartments of the young royals, and that is the world this little painting belongs to. A woman stops at a stone fountain with two children, one of them holding a water jug, the ordinary business of fetching water made graceful enough for a palace wall. Goya kept these early scenes deliberately light. The design would then be copied, thread by thread, into wool by the weavers of the Santa Bárbara factory.