La caccia alla quaglia

In 1775 Goya was twenty-nine and newly arrived in Madrid, and this was work-for-hire, not a picture meant to be framed. It is a tapestry cartoon, a full-size painting made only as a pattern for weavers at the royal factory of Santa Barbara. The series showed hunting scenes, a favourite pastime of the future king Charles IV, then still the young Prince of Asturias, and they were woven to hang in his rooms at the Escorial palace. So the figures here, loading guns and waiting in the field for quail, were designed to be copied thread by thread in wool. The cartoons themselves were rolled up and forgotten in a palace storeroom, and only turned up again more than a century later.