Les Lavandières

This was never meant to hang as a painting. In 1779 Goya was a young designer at the royal court in Madrid, and this is a full-size cartoon, a pattern for weavers to copy in wool. The finished tapestry would warm a room in the palace at El Pardo, the antechamber of the prince and princess of Asturias. So he gave them something light: washerwomen resting on a riverbank, one tipping a young lamb toward a sleeping companion to tickle her awake. Behind them the snow-capped peaks of the Guadarrama mountains rise over Madrid, in the silvery light he had studied in Velazquez. Goya delivered it to the royal tapestry works in January 1780, one of eleven such designs he made for that single room.