Dance of the Majos at the Banks of Manzanares

In the 1770s Goya was not yet the dark, famous painter of his later years. He was a young man in Madrid making full-size designs for the royal tapestry works, patterns to be copied in wool. This one was headed for a dining room at the Escorial palace, for the prince who would become King Carlos IV. The dancers are majos and majas, working people of Madrid known for their swagger and their sharp clothes, dancing a seguidilla on the banks of the Manzanares river. It was a fashion the bored aristocracy loved to copy. Goya gives the whole scene a long afternoon light. Years later he bought a house on that same stretch of river, the one whose walls he would cover with his black, haunted paintings.