Hunter at a fountain

In 1786 Goya was appointed a painter to King Charles III and went back to work for the Royal Tapestry Factory, producing the full-size painted designs that weavers copied thread by thread into wall hangings. These cartoons were oil on canvas, but they were never meant to hang as pictures. They were patterns for a loom, decorating the rooms of the royal palaces outside Madrid. Hunting subjects suited the household of the Prince of Asturias, the future Charles IV, who was a keen hunter, so Goya filled them with ordinary Spaniards at leisure in the countryside. Many of these cartoons were later rolled up and left in the Prado's cellars, where a group of them was rediscovered only in the 1980s.