Royal Tapestry Factory

This guide to the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid follows the young Francisco de Goya, who spent seventeen years designing cheerful tapestry cartoons here, kite flyers, washerwomen, wedding crowds, before his subjects darkened in the mid-1780s toward peasants trudging through snow. It traces that shift alongside a mysterious illness that struck the painter in the winter of 1792. Inside this Neo-Mudéjar hall built in 1889, weavers still work the same high-warp looms Goya's contemporaries used.