Die Holzfäller

This is Goya at the start, in his early thirties, still a supplier to the royal tapestry factory rather than the famous court painter he would become. It is not really a finished picture but a cartoon, a full-size painting handed to weavers to copy in wool, this one delivered in January 1780 for a room in the El Pardo palace outside Madrid. Three woodcutters work a tree: two swing at the high branches while a third, seen from behind, stoops to gather the cut wood, the figures turned into a slow spiral so the eye keeps moving. Because it was made to hang above a window, Goya kept it simple and legible from below. The cartoons were rolled up and forgotten in a palace store for decades, until they were rediscovered and moved to the Prado in 1870, which is the only reason the original paintings survive at all.