La caída

In 1786 Goya was made a painter to the king, and his career was climbing. The next year he delivered a set of seven small pictures to one of Spain's most cultivated patrons, the Duchess of Osuna, for the walls of her family's country retreat outside Madrid, a fashionable garden estate called El Capricho. This is one of them. A woman has fallen from her donkey on a country outing and lies fainting in the arms of two companions who kneel to catch her, while others still on their mounts look back in alarm. It is light and anecdotal, almost a comedy of a bad afternoon, the sunny and sociable Goya of the 1780s decorating the rooms of the rich. The darker, haunted work that his name usually calls up was still years off, and would come only after a severe illness in the 1790s left him deaf.