The Holy Family

Four figures, not three. Joseph stands at the left with his flowering staff, Mary sits at the centre in blue and rose, the naked Christ Child is on her lap reaching up towards Joseph's hand, and at the right the infant John the Baptist leans in to look at him. That is the whole picture. Goya gave it no room, no window and no furniture, only a dark ground with the light coming off the skin.

The manner is not yet his own. The smooth, precise drawing and the pyramid the four bodies make come from Anton Raphael Mengs, first painter to the Spanish king in those years, and even the Virgin's blue and red follow his rule that those colours bring a figure forward. The date is still argued over, from about 1774 to the 1780s. The State bought the canvas in 1877 for 2,000 pesetas, and it reached the Prado days later.