Le Médecin

Before Goya was court painter, and long before the dark, haunted late work, he spent years supplying full-size paintings to the royal tapestry factory in Madrid, designs the weavers would copy in wool. He delivered this one, with ten others, in January 1780. A doctor sits wrapped against the cold, warming his hands over a dish of glowing coals while two students stand behind him, and the bare tree marks the season as winter. It was designed to hang above a door, which is why the viewpoint is low and the coals and books sit so boldly up front. The tapestry woven from it was meant for a room in the palace of El Pardo outside Madrid, one of the winter residences of the Spanish court.