The boy in red is about four years old, and the painting is full of menace. Around 1787 Goya painted Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga, the son of the Count and Countess of Altamira, in a bright red suit with a white collar, holding a string tied to a magpie. The bird carries a small card in its beak with Goya's name on it, as if the painter were signing the picture through the bird.
Behind the boy, three cats sit in the shadows and stare at the magpie. Beside them is a cage of finches. Whatever Goya meant, the picture has a tension that a normal child's portrait does not. The cats are about to pounce, the birds are in danger, and the boy stands calmly in the middle of it all.
Writers have read the scene in different ways. Some see it as a warning about the fragility of childhood, and others as a joke about the dangers of an aristocratic upbringing. Goya gives no answer. What is clear is his skill: the silver light on the suit and the soft, direct gaze of the child.
Goya was a rising court artist when he painted it, and the Altamira family were among his important patrons. The painting is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it is known simply as The Red Boy.
Goya's The Red Boy appears on our: