The Crockery Seller

Goya painted this to be turned into wool. In the 1770s his day job was designing tapestry cartoons for the royal workshop, full-size paintings that weavers would copy thread by thread to hang on palace walls. This one, invoiced at the start of 1779, was meant for a bedroom of the Prince and Princess of Asturias at El Pardo, outside Madrid. A young woman stands at the centre of it with a basket on her arm, selling acerolas, the small hawthorn fruit that was hawked in the streets of Madrid. She is dressed as a maja and flirting quite openly with the three cloaked men leaning in around her. The canvas is a tall narrow strip, cut to fill the wall between two windows, and the tapestry woven from it hung on the south side of the room. Goya was in his early thirties here, still years away from the darker work that made his name.