Francisco Goya

This wasn't made to hang on a wall at all, apparently — it's a full-size design for a tapestry, painted so the king's weavers had something to copy. The set it belonged to went into a palace dining room. Cheerful stuff to eat your lunch under, I suppose.

The museum doesn't seem certain this is actually his. There's a very close version of the same scene elsewhere and, from what I've read, people have argued for a century about which came first and who painted which. The two young women are majas — a working-class Madrid style that rich families copied.

Painted around the time she married into the family of Spain's chief minister, from what I can find — the sort of match that was half business, and the portrait was part of announcing it. The clothes are French, which is what you wore in Madrid if you could afford to.

The bird has a little card in its beak with the painter's own name on it — supposedly that was his way of signing it. People who've studied it reckon the cats and the caged birds are about how quickly a child's world can turn, though that might be a lot to hang on a family commission.

These were sold as a set of eighty, in an ordinary shop rather than anywhere grand, and pulled off sale after a couple of weeks — the usual explanation is that he got nervous about the Inquisition. This one was meant to open the second half, and there's a note attributed to him saying the idea is that reason and imagination go wrong without each other. Whether that's the whole story, I couldn't tell you.

Most of what I could find reads this one as being about marriage — a knot you couldn't get out of in Spain at the time. It's plate 75 of the same set of eighty. The owl I can't explain, and nobody I read seemed sure either.