Cazador cargando su escopeta

In 1775 Goya arrived in Madrid from provincial Zaragoza, 29 years old and largely unknown, and took on the kind of job that opened doors, designs to be woven into tapestries for the royal palaces. This is one of them, a full-size painting made only so weavers could copy it in wool, meant for a dining room at El Escorial for the future King Charles IV. A hunter pauses to load his gun, a dog resting at his feet, the trees stretched tall to fit the shape of the wall it would cover. Goya had stepped in to finish a set another painter left behind. The cartoons were later stored away and only pulled from a palace basement about a century after his death.