El cacharrero

In 1779 Goya was still a young man supplying designs to the royal tapestry works, painting cheerful scenes to be woven for the palace bedrooms of the future Charles IV. This one shows a Valencian pottery seller at a Madrid fair, his wares, some of them prized Alcora ceramics, spread on the ground while two young women crouch to choose. Goya slipped something under the cheer. Nearly everyone here wants what they cannot have. The poor in the background can buy nothing, two gentlemen sit with their backs to us watching a fine lady pass, and the lady herself rides trapped in her carriage beside a man in black, gazing out at a fair she is not free to join. Woven in wool, it was to hang as decoration for a prince who would likely never notice the melancholy folded into it.