Bayeu introduced his son-in-law to Raphael Mengs, who was in the height of favor at Court. This German painter, who had been invited to Spain by Charles III, owed his European reputation to his servile imitation of his namesake, Raphael. He was a facile, academic mannerist; drawing inspiration for his subjects from the Classics and rendering them with a purity of style that was absolutely bloodless. He was, however, sufficiently large-minded to discover value in the young Goya. The King had requested his Court painter to make an effort to revive the Royal Tapestry Works of Santa Barbara, and Mengs was engaging painters to execute designs. He gave a series to Goya, who prepared the cartoons which are now in the Prado. Some of them were executed in the weave and can be seen in a room of the Escoriál, adjoining another, decorated with tapestries after designs by Teniers. The latter’s example may have influenced Goya in his choice of subjects, for he took the theme of popular pastimes and treated them naturalistically. The significance of this lies in its contrast to the conditions then existing. For the tapestries which were _à la mode_ at that time both in France and Spain were the Boucher designs, in which little court gentlemen and ladies play at being shepherds and milkmaids, and indulge in pretty travesties of country life, under conditions of an impossible and ridiculous age of innocence. As we come to know Goya we are not [Illustration: MAIA, NUDE GOYA THE PRADO] surprised that this view of art had no interest for him. We find him to have been from boyhood an eager liver, interested to the full in life; so we do not now share the surprise that his contemporaries must have felt when they saw these cartoons. To a society accustomed to an art of academic imitation and rococo lackadaisicalness, they may well have been a shock. They seem also to have come as a welcome relief, for they made Goya popular; moreover they established for him a character of being independent, of which he subsequently took full advantage. The color schemes of these designs are noteworthy. While the Teniers tapestries are based on a very naive use of the primary colors, red, blue and yellow, and the Boucher on a subtle use of the same, in which the sharpness of the hues is silvered down to demi-tints, the Goya introduce the secondary colors. They involve the red, yellow and blue, but merely as flashes of brilliance in a groundwork of plum-color, purple, dull brown-red, deep orange and blue, and rich greens, enlivened with white and velvety black. The schemes are intricate, varied, and above all, positive; the work of an artist with an original, if still unmatured, sense of color. Goya, indeed, proclaimed in this early work the fact that he was a colorist; although, as yet, there is little suggestion of the kind of colorist he was going to prove himself.