Der Drachen

This is young Goya doing his day job. In the 1770s he was painting full-size scenes to be copied in wool by the royal tapestry works, decoration for the palaces of the Spanish court. He delivered this one in January 1778 for the dining room of the prince and princess who would later rule as Charles IV and his queen. It is all ease and daylight, young men lounging by a rock just outside town, three of them watching a kite drift up at the left. This is more than a decade before the illness and the private darkness that fill his late work. Even the building on the far horizon suits the sunny mood, an observatory of the sort Charles III's reforming ministers kept proposing.