Il gioco della pelota con le racchette

This is not a finished picture but a full-size cartoon, a painted pattern the weavers of Madrid's royal tapestry works copied thread for thread. Goya had come to the capital in the 1770s as a young provincial, and cartoons like this were how he earned his place at court, under the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs. The subject caught a small social shift. Pelota, once a game of the nobility, had spread to ordinary Madrid by the 1770s, now trailing a reputation for gambling and rowdy crowds. Goya boasted on his invoice about the sheer number of figures he had packed in, two teams of three players and some 25 onlookers strung along the wall behind.