The Holy Family

Wood shavings on the floor say where this is happening, in Joseph's carpentry shop. The light in the dark room comes off the Child and his mother and spreads from there, and Goya followed it with great naturalness. Joseph holds his flowering staff. Both parents look at the boy with something close to sadness, because of the small wooden cross in his hands. The picture dates from about 1787, when Goya was in his forties and painter to the king, and a Prado curator, Manuela Mena, has suggested that the tenderness of the Child owes something to his own son Javier, born three years earlier. It had a companion piece, Tobias and the Angel. Both stayed in private hands in Madrid and were unknown to Goya scholarship until 2003.