Winter Scene

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes · c. 1786

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

34.3 × 35.6 cm (13 1/2 × 14 in.); Framed: 49.6 × 50.8 × 7.7 cm (19 1/2 × 20 × 3 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Winter Scene captures the raw hostility of the Spanish cold — a group of travelers and their pig pressing forward through a blinding snowstorm, heads bowed against the wind. Goya painted this canvas around 1786 as one of a series of tapestry cartoons commissioned by the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara. These designs were intended to be woven into decorative tapestries for the royal palaces, yet Goya used the format to document the real texture of Spanish peasant life — its seasons, its hardships, its humor. Where many of his contemporaries painted allegory and mythology, Goya looked out of the window. The muted palette here, all grey sky and pale ground, is handled with a directness unusual for court-commissioned work. The tapestry cartoon series is one of the few extended bodies of work in which Goya depicted ordinary people navigating ordinary hardship, a thread that would run through his career long after royal commissions had ended. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on artist-grade canvas using traditional oil pigments, closely following Goya's tonal range and brushwork — so the flat winter light and the hunched figures carry the same quiet weight as the original hanging in Chicago.