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 in 1779 for rooms at the Escorial. Its strange tall, narrow shape is not a whim. It was built to fit a specific slot of wall, a strip between a door and a window, 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 in January 1780.