Le Transport d'une pierre de taille

In 1786 Goya was made a painter to Charles III of Spain, and much of that year went into designs for tapestries to hang in the royal palaces, large paintings that weavers would copy thread by thread. He kept choosing ordinary labour as his subject. Here workmen haul a great squared block of building stone, an ashlar, the kind of heavy, unglamorous effort rarely thought worth a royal wall. It was a moment when reform-minded Spaniards in Goya's circle argued for the dignity and safety of working people, and his scenes from these years quietly take their side. In those same years he painted a labourer being carried off after a fall from scaffolding, hurt at just this sort of work.