Инфант Франсиско де Паула

This is a study Goya made in 1800 for his big group portrait of the family of Charles IV. The boy is Francisco de Paula, the king's youngest son, about six here, and Goya finished this small head more carefully than any of the others, catching a shy, curious face against a plain grey ground. Eight years later that same child helped set off a rebellion without meaning to. In the spring of 1808, with Napoleon's troops occupying Madrid, the French moved to take the last royal children away to France. A crowd gathered outside the palace, saw the frightened infante at a window, and refused to let him go. The street fighting that broke out that day, the 2nd of May, became the uprising Goya would paint a few years later with its French firing squads.