Summer

Goya's Summer (The Harvest) from 1786, in the Prado, is one of the most ambitious of his tapestry cartoon series, a monumental horizontal composition depicting the communal labour of wheat harvesting in the sunny Spanish countryside. The tapestry cartoons were the central occupation of Goya's early career, commissioned by the royal tapestry manufactory to provide designs for the private apartments of the royal family, and they gave him the opportunity to develop his compositional skills in large format while establishing his reputation as an observer of Spanish popular life. The series depicting the four seasons — of which Summer is the largest and most ambitious — represents Goya at his most optimistic and Rococo, before the illness, political upheavals, and personal darkness that would transform his artistic personality after 1792. The comparison between this sunlit harvest scene and the Black Paintings, made barely thirty years later, charts one of the most dramatic personal and artistic transformations in the history of European painting.

The bright, luminous palette and the carefully arranged figural composition demonstrate Goya's mastery of the decorative tapestry cartoon format. The naturalistic rendering of peasant figures and the warm Spanish landscape show his developing powers of observation within a decorative framework.