Der blinde Gitarrist

Another of Goya's tapestry cartoons for the royal weavers, this one turns on a figure you would have met in any Spanish town in the 1770s, a blind street musician singing the news of the day, usually something grim or scandalous, to a ring of listeners caught between pity and fascination. Goya noted on his bill that the instrument was a vihuela, an old plucked instrument older than the guitar. The weavers found the crowded design too hard to reproduce and sent it back to be simplified. Goya thought enough of the original to etch it onto a copperplate first, the largest print he ever made and the only one of his cartoons he chose to record that way.