The Threshing Floor

The Threshing Floor, known in Spanish as La trilla, is a small oil sketch on canvas by Francisco de Goya, dated 1786. It was a preparatory study for a tapestry cartoon in the fifth series Goya designed for the rooms of the Prince and Princess of Asturias at the Palace of El Pardo, where the finished scene was titled Summer. Such sketches were usually submitted for royal approval before the full-size cartoons were made, yet this one never entered the royal collection. Goya kept it until he sold it, along with several other works, to his patrons the Duke and Duchess of Osuna. After remaining at the Alameda de Osuna and passing through an auction in 1896, it was bought between 1925 and 1927 by the collector José Lázaro Galdiano, and it now hangs in the museum that bears his name in Madrid.

The composition is arranged as a panoramic view built around three groups of peasants resting during the threshing, each shown in a different mood. On the left rises a medieval castle, and four men tease a peasant who is drinking, an echo of Goya's own The Drinker. He gives this figure a white shirt that glows at the centre of the scene, a device he would use again in The Third of May 1808, though the subjects could hardly be more different. In the background children play with a cart of grain while a horse grazes calmly. Elsewhere a burly labourer and a mare rest as another man portions out wheat for the next threshing. One woman has noticed a child in danger, probably her own son, and lifts him from the cart; another nurses her baby.

The warm, luminous palette still owes much to the Rococo tradition Goya admired, but his close attention to rural life and everyday gesture points toward the more naturalistic art of his later career.

Painter

Francisco Goya

Date

1786

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

34 × 76 cm

Museum

Lázaro Galdiano Museum, Madrid

Movement

Rococo

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