El pastor tocando la dulzaina

A few years on from his first tapestry cartoons, Goya was trusted with a whole scheme for the prince's dining room at the El Pardo palace, built around the four seasons. This panel, painted in 1786, was one of two narrow pictures meant to sit above the windows on either side of the tapestry of Spring. A young man in shepherd's clothes leans back against a low mound and plays a dulzaina, the Spanish double-reed pipe you can still hear at village festivals. Goya tilts the whole scene up steeply, as if you were standing right below the musician and looking up, a bit of illusionism he had picked up from the Venetian and Bolognese ceiling painters he admired on his trip to Italy years earlier. Set high over a doorway, the trick would have made the shepherd seem to be piping down into the room.