持竿的渔夫

This tall, narrow panel is one of Goya's earliest works for the crown, painted in 1775 when he was not yet 30 and just starting as a designer for the royal tapestry factory in Madrid. The set it belonged to was all hunting scenes for a royal dining room, and this is the odd one out, a man quietly fishing with a rod while hunters with shotguns move behind him. Its shape was dictated by the wall, a slim strip meant to fit beside a door, which is why everything stacks upward. One early scholar even wondered whether the angler's face was Goya's own. Whatever the truth of that, it was among the very first cartoons he delivered, the start of nearly two decades of such work before he became a court painter in his own right.