Blind Man's Bluff

This bright, easy scene of young people in a ring, one blindfolded and reaching with a wooden spoon while the others dance out of reach, was never meant to be a painting you hang. Goya made it in 1788 as a cartoon, a full-size design to be copied by weavers into tapestry, for a room in the royal palace of El Pardo outside Madrid. The dancers wear the clothes of ordinary Spaniards, the majos and majas whose style the aristocracy liked to borrow. That same year the old king, Charles III, fell ill and died in December, and the work on the room stopped. Of this whole late series, this is the only design that was actually woven before the plan was abandoned. The rest stayed as paintings, which is how they survive at all.