Around 1775 -1823 · Princely portrait, popular childhood and black vision

Goya refuses a single image of childhood: princes and child readers rub shoulders with play, vulnerability and mythical violence, from the luminous court portrait to the black paintings of old age.

Francisco de Goya observes childhood in radically different registers. A court painter, he represents children and young aristocrats with their clothes, toys and dynastic signs, while revealing their age, gravity or fragility. In his tapestry boxes, drawings and genre scenes, children play, read, imitate adults or face poverty. This attention is never simply decorative: Goya captures power relations and social learning. At the other end of his work, Saturn devouring one of his children transforms filiation into terror. Painted on the wall of the Quinta del Sordo, this vision traditionally identified with the myth of Saturn condenses old age, destruction and fear of being replaced. The selection "Children at Francisco de Goya" notably compares Two children looking at a book and Sebastiân Gabriel de Borbon as a child. His reading favors light.

In Goya, the child can inherit a throne, share a book or become a victim: childhood always reveals the world constructed by adults.