Boys with Mastiffs

Two boys hold back two very large dogs, and both dogs are muzzled. One of the collars carries an inscription, worn and incomplete, which the museum reads as a mark of the royal service, so these are animals from the king's own kennels. Goya painted them at full size in oil in 1786, the year he was put on the royal payroll as a painter to the king. It was never meant to hang as a picture. This is a cartoon, a design for the weavers of the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara to copy in wool, one of thirteen planned for the dining room of the Prince and Princess of Asturias at El Pardo, the palace the court used in winter for hunting. It was to sit above a door, paired with a boy riding a ram, now in Chicago. Carlos III died in December 1788, the commission stopped and the tapestries were never hung. The cartoons were rolled onto sticks and put in store, and in May 1869 they were found in the cellars of the Royal Palace in Madrid. This one reached the Prado the following year.