Die Elster auf dem Baum

In 1786 Goya was named a painter to the king, and much of his work that year was made not to hang on a wall but to be copied in wool. He supplied full-scale paintings, called cartoons, to the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Barbara, where weavers turned them into hangings for the royal palaces. This one is mostly open sky, with birds crossing it at different heights and a magpie perched in the tree, a bird known for robbing other birds' nests. The cartoons were rolled up and stored for decades. They reached the Prado only in 1870, brought over from the palace storerooms.