The wounded bricklayer

In 1786 Goya was a court painter turning out designs for the royal tapestry works, full-size paintings that weavers would copy in wool. This one was meant for the dining room of the young Prince of Asturias at the El Pardo palace outside Madrid. It shows two labourers carrying a third who has fallen from a scaffold, the low sky and bare ground making the accident plain. Goya had first sketched the scene as a joke, the man merely drunk and his mates laughing. Before he made the final cartoon he changed his mind and turned it into something serious, a workman hurt on the job, at a moment when Enlightenment Spain was starting to talk about the conditions of ordinary labour. The tapestry was never woven; the king died in 1788 and the room was abandoned.