The wounded bricklayer

The Wounded Bricklayer from 1786, in the Prado, is a tapestry cartoon that introduces a note of genuine social concern into the decorative programme of the royal apartments. The image of a construction worker being supported by two companions after a fall or accident — his head lolling, his body slack with injury or intoxication — is a subject that academic landscape or history painting would never have admitted: the physical reality of working-class injury, observed without sentimentality. The companion sketch in the Prado — El albañil borracho — shows the same or a similar figure in an earlier compositional state, allowing comparison of how Goya developed the subject from initial idea to finished cartoon. The large scale of the finished cartoon — 268 by 110 cm — meant this image of working-class hardship was woven in considerable detail into tapestry for a royal apartment, creating an unusual conjunction between the social reality of construction labour and the decorative context of an aristocratic interior. The subject anticipates by thirty years the social awareness of his wartime genre scenes.

Goya renders the scene with unusual seriousness for a tapestry cartoon, using the heavy, inert body of the injured man and his companions' effort to convey physical reality rather than decorative charm.