L'Aire de battage

In 1786 Francisco Goya had just been named a painter to the Spanish king, and one of his jobs was to design tapestries for the royal palaces. This is his oil sketch for Summer, a scene of harvesters resting in the midday heat around a threshing floor. The finished version he worked up from it became the largest canvas he ever painted, woven into tapestry for a dining room at El Pardo, the court's hunting palace outside Madrid. At this stage Goya was still the cheerful chronicler of Spanish country pleasures, decades before the deafness and the dark paintings people know him for. This small study kept the loose, quick brushwork the big cartoon would smooth away.