Madrid fair

This is early Goya, bright and easy, decades before the nightmares and the deaf, black years. In 1778 he was 32 and working for the royal tapestry factory, painting full-scale designs that weavers would copy in wool for the palace walls. This one was made for the bedroom of the future King Carlos IV and his wife. It shows a fashionable couple pausing at a fair stall hung with pictures, a connoisseur beside them squinting up through his spectacles at the paintings for sale. Off in the afternoon sky behind them stands the new dome of San Francisco el Grande, a Madrid church finished only a year or two before. The weavers turned the design into a tapestry, and the painting itself went to the Prado in 1870.