Spanish school; XIX century. "The seesaw". Oil on canvas. Relined. Measurements: 46,5 x 35 cm; 62 x 50 cm (frame). This work follows the models of one of the tapestry cartoons made by Goya. According to the study of the Goya Foundation "Around 1856 or 1857 this carton was taken from the Royal Tapestry Factory to the Royal Palace of Madrid. In 1870 the cartoons for tapestries that were in the basements of the Palace were transferred to the Prado Museum, then called the Museum of Painting and Sculpture. At that time, six of Goya's cartoons were missing, including the one in question. This carton was lost track of for many years until it was brought to the Philadelphia Museum of Art from a private collection in 1975. It was donated by Anna Warren Ingersoll". One of the most outstanding painters in the history of universal art, Francisco de Goya received his first drawing and painting lessons from José Luzán Martínez, who taught at his home and also at the Academy of Drawing founded in Zaragoza in 1754. After three years of studies with this teacher, Goya applied for a pension from the Royal Academy of San Fernando in 1763, at the age of seventeen. It seems that by then he was already a student of Francisco Bayeu, who had returned from court. However, Goya did not manage to enter the Academy, nor when he tried again in 1766. Around 1770 he undertook a trip to Italy to broaden his training and improve his possibilities. There he would leave evidence of his early taste for the grotesque and the satirical. After a long career, Goya was replaced as Pintor de Cámara by Vicente López, and he entered a period of isolation, bitterness and illness that led him to seclude himself in the Quinta del Sordo, on the outskirts of Madrid, where he produced his supreme work: the Pinturas Negras (Black Paintings). Fed up with the absolutism imposed by Ferdinand VII in Spain, Goya finally left for France in 1824, where he met with exiled liberal friends. There he spent his last years and produced his final work, "The Milkmaid of Bordeaux", in which he anticipated impressionism. Today his work is part of the most important art galleries in the world, from the Prado Museum to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Louvre in Paris or the National Gallery in London.