El juego del caballo y el jinete

By 1791 Goya had been supplying the royal tapestry works for years and was tiring of it, but he took one last commission, a set of playful scenes for the bedrooms of the little princesses at the El Pardo palace outside Madrid. This cartoon shows five boys clambering on each other's shoulders in a rough game the Spanish called gigantillas, a kind of children's chicken-fight, set against low hills and woods. The series was never finished. The king who had ordered it, Charles III, died, the court scattered to its other royal seats, and the project was abandoned unwoven. A couple of years later a severe illness left Goya permanently deaf, and this hillside of tumbling boys sits among the last of the light, playful designs he made before that.