Boy on a Ram

Boy on a Ram, painted by Francisco de Goya in 1786–87, is one of the seven great cartoons he made for the dining room of the Prince of Asturias at the Pardo — a laughing child in a white smock and red sash perched backwards on a bounding ram, its wool flung up in the wind of the charge. The picture is pure holiday: the animal surges across the canvas, the boy clings on in delight, and Goya’s brush races with the motion, the creamy fleece and the bright red of the sash set against a wide open sky. Painted at the height of his powers as a court painter, before the wars and the dark visions, it shows the sheer joy of which his art was capable — and it remains one of the most exuberant images in the whole of Spanish painting. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.