Der Sonnenschirm

Goya painted this in 1777, early in his career, as a full-scale design for a tapestry. The royal workshops couldn't weave from a small sketch, so painters supplied cartoons like this one at the finished size, and this was meant to hang as cloth in a dining room for the future Charles IV. It's a light, sunny thing: a young woman on a grassy bank with a little dog in her lap, a young man beside her holding a green parasol to keep the sun off her face. That green shadow across her is the whole point of the picture, Goya working out how coloured light falls on skin. He was still decades from the dark, haunted paintings of his old age.