L'eremo di Sant'Isidoro

Every 15 May, Madrid still celebrates San Isidro, the city's patron saint, and in 1788 Goya was painting that festival for the royal tapestry works. This small canvas is one of his sketches for the series, showing the little hermitage on its hill above the crowds who climb up to it on the saint's day. Then Charles III, the king who had ordered the tapestries, died that December, and the whole project was dropped. The larger companion scene of the meadow below was left as one of Goya's most ambitious open-air pictures, and this sketch of the chapel was never woven. It came to the Prado from an auction in 1896.