公鸡客栈的争吵

This is early, cheerful Goya, decades before the nightmares. In 1777 he was a young painter of 31, newly employed at the royal tapestry workshop in Madrid, turning out lively scenes of ordinary Spanish life to be woven into hangings for the palace walls. This one was destined for the dining room of the prince and princess of Asturias at the palace of El Pardo. It shows card players from different corners of Spain turning on each other over money, pulling knives in a roadside inn, and the young Goya plays the violence half for laughs. This small oil is his first working-out of the scene. In the larger finished cartoon he even changed the name of the inn before it went to the loom.