Children with a Cart

Children with a Cart from 1779, at the Toledo Museum of Art, belongs to Goya's early series of tapestry cartoons depicting popular amusements and the daily life of the Spanish people. These early commissions for the royal tapestry manufactory established his reputation as an observer of Spanish popular culture and gave him the opportunity to develop large-scale compositional skills in a decorative context. The playful children with their cart represent the innocent pastoral Spain that Goya celebrated in his early career, before the illness, political turmoil, and personal loss that would darken his subject matter after 1792. The Toledo Museum of Art, one of Ohio's great civic art collections, holds this early Goya as part of a European collection that spans from the medieval through the nineteenth century. The painting's bright palette and cheerful subject embody the Rococo spirit that Goya was absorbing from the French and Italian painting he admired before developing his own more personally intense artistic vision.

The outdoor composition captures the children's playful energy with a bright, decorative palette suited to the tapestry medium. Goya's handling of the figures and the landscape shows his developing naturalism within the decorative conventions of the cartoon format.