La cacharrera

Goya painted this to be turned into wool. In the 1770s his day job was designing tapestry cartoons for the royal workshop, full-size paintings that weavers would copy thread by thread to hang on palace walls. This one, delivered in 1779, was meant for a bedroom of the Prince and Princess of Asturias at El Pardo, outside Madrid. A Valencian crockery seller has spread his pottery on the ground, and a young woman in the foreground turns a bowl over in her hands, weighing whether to buy. Behind them a carriage rolls past carrying a fine lady and two gentlemen, a glimpse of a whole different Madrid. Goya was in his early thirties here, still years away from the darker work that made his name.