Boy with a Bird

In the late 1770s Goya was not yet the court's great portraitist. He was a young painter turning out full-size designs for the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid, patterns the weavers would copy in wool for the walls of royal palaces. This is one of them, made for the antechamber to the bedroom of the Prince and Princess of Asturias at El Pardo, the royal palace outside Madrid. Its strange tall, narrow shape is not a whim. It was cut to fill a corner of that room, a strip of wall forty centimetres wide, so the whole scene climbs upward. A boy sits with his back to us, playing with a goldfinch, while the bird's mate waits on a thin branch overhead. Goya handed it to the weavers on 24 January 1780, with ten other cartoons for the same room.