Children with a Cart

Goya designed this in 1779 not as a picture to be framed but as a full-size pattern, a cartoon, for weavers at the royal tapestry works to copy in wool. It was meant to hang over a door in the prince's apartments at the El Pardo palace. Four children play at driving a little cart, one of them beating a drum, the sort of cheerful everyday scene the young Goya was set to turn out by the dozen. Once the tapestry was woven, cartoons like this were simply rolled up and stored away, and this one only resurfaced generations later. Its recent history is stranger still: on its way to a New York exhibition in 2006 it was stolen from a parked truck in Pennsylvania, and turned up three weeks later in a New Jersey basement.