Il prato di San Isidro

Goya painted this in 1788 as a sketch for a tapestry meant to hang in the princes' rooms at the Pardo palace outside Madrid. It shows the city on the feast of San Isidro, its patron saint, when crowds crossed the river to drink the spring water and picnic on the far bank. Across the middle distance you can pick out the real skyline of the day, the royal palace and the great dome of San Francisco el Grande. The full tapestry never came. Charles III died that December, the family stopped using the Pardo, and the weavers complained that Goya had packed in far too much fine detail to ever copy in thread. So the grand design survives only here, at barely a metre wide.