ANNETTE LAREAU: I'm struck that this beautiful little boy is portrayed as being very fragile. His skin is virtually white, suggesting he's not playing in the sun and getting tanned.

Hi, I'm Annette Lareau. I'm a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and I study social class and children's daily lives.

There's tremendous attention to his clothing. The clothing is beautiful, but it’s not the sort of outfit where the boy could run around and get dirty.

NARRATOR: The formality of this boy’s clothing is typical of many eighteenth-century portraits of upper-class children. So, what makes this portrait extraordinary? For Associate Curator David Pullins, part of it is the animals that surround the boy—each telling a kind of hidden story—in symbols. On the right, for example, are pet finches in a cage.

DAVID PULLINS: Songbirds in the 18th century often are seen as a sign of the gilded cage, is usually one easy way to understand it. They're both safe, and privileged, and precious, but they also were trapped.

NARRATOR: Much more ominous are the cats on the left side.

DAVID PULLINS: And cats in the eighteenth century in painting are rarely a straightforwardly good thing. Dogs, on the whole, you can count on to be faithful, friendly, et cetera, but cats usually introduce something that's not totally domesticated. So there's this sense of threat.

NARRATOR: The cats stare at the magpie on the string…are they about to pounce?

This sense of foreboding is heightened when we learn that this little boy died at the age of eight, a few years after this was painted.

DAVID PULLINS: Goya is someone who usually embeds into his paintings a sense of unease, a sense of threat or something destabilizing, and so the fact that this child will die has kind of only brought that to our attention further. Goya builds in that sense of instability and tension from the get-go, which allows for these kind of ambivalent readings, including looking back through the lens of the knowledge that the child will die.