The boy has a magpie on a string, and the magpie has a piece of paper in its beak. The paper is Goya's visiting card, with his name written on it. That is where the signature on this painting is: in the mouth of a bird that three cats are watching.
Who the boy was
Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, second son of the Count of Altamira, born in 1784. Goya painted him in 1787 or 1788, so he is three or four years old here, in a red suit with a wide sash, holding the string in both hands.
His father commissioned it, and Goya painted other members of the family in the same two years. This was Goya on the way up: he had been made a painter to the king in 1786 and had the aristocracy of Madrid sitting for him.
Manuel died in 1792, at the age of eight. Four years after the paint dried, which is the fact that reorganises everything else in the picture whether or not Goya meant it to.
The cats
Look past the boy. On one side of him there is a cage of finches. On the other, in the dark, three cats are locked onto the magpie with the kind of stillness cats manage just before they move.
Nothing in the composition protects the bird. It is on a string, at ground level, in reach. The boy is looking out at the painter, perfectly calm, holding the end of the string and quite unaware of the three sets of eyes behind his left shoulder.
The finches make the same point from the other direction: safe, and caged, which is the only way they are safe. So the picture is a small boy in a red suit flanked by one creature that is caged and one that is not, with the predators placed between them and the dark doing the rest.
A bird on a string
The magpie is not a prop Goya invented. European painters had put a bird on a string into children's portraits for centuries, and the bird on the string carried an old reading: the soul, tethered, alive, capable of getting away.
What Goya did was add the audience. Put three cats in the shadow and the old symbol stops being decorative and starts being a countdown. The card in the beak pins his own name to it.
So the picture is a portrait of a four-year-old in a red suit, and also a short lesson in how briefly anything stays safe. It came to New York through the collector Jules Bache and has hung in the Metropolitan Museum since 1949, where the red suit is the first thing anybody sees from across the room. The cats take a second look.
Three cats, a magpie on a string, and Goya's own card in its beak. The red suit is the part that lasts; the boy did not reach nine.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.