The tree boy

In the late 1770s Goya was not yet the court's great portraitist. He was a young painter in his early 30s turning out full-size designs for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara in Madrid, pictures made to be copied thread by thread in wool for the walls of royal palaces. This one, delivered in January 1780, was cut to a narrow shape to fit a corner of the antechamber to the bedroom of the Prince and Princess of Asturias at El Pardo, outside Madrid, where it made a pair with Boy with a Bird on the north wall. Two boys work at a tree, one reaching up into the branches while the other waits below with a basket. Goya painted dozens of these cheerful everyday scenes before illness and the court changed his work entirely. The cartoons sat rolled in storage for decades and came to the Prado in 1870.