The Seesaw

Around 1780 Goya was still a young painter working for the royal tapestry factory in Madrid, turning out full-size designs that weavers would copy in wool for the walls of the royal palaces. This one, meant for a room in the palace of El Pardo, shows two children playing on a plank seesaw beside a garden wall, one riding high while the other braces on the ground. The subject is deliberately light, a scene of ordinary childhood games chosen to warm a formal royal apartment. Goya spent years on cartoons like this before the court finally let him paint the people who lived behind those walls.