This watercolor offers a profile view -similar to a low relief- of a child or young faun sitting on a fragment of an Ionic entablature with egg-and-dart decorations above an astragal. The slender, nude child recalls the Italian boys who worked as models in academies and were depicted by European painters and sculptors. At the academies where he studied, Fortuny had drawn numerous nude boys, some playing the flute, but his first concrete approach to the model was a drawing now at the Biblioteca nacional in Madrid. According to his friend, painter Attilio Simonetti, he made at the Accademia Gigi in Rome in 1865 as a preparatory sketch for one of his best-known engravings: Idilio. Dated in Rome in 1865, it precedes the present watercolor by three years, although the composition is essentially the same. In the drawing, the entablature has been replaced by a simple cube, with no reference to the landscape and no goat. It is notable that the painter so closely followed the print’s composition in this later and larger watercolor. The etched modeling of the body, with its markedly contrasting light and shadows is softened in the watercolor’s dark ochers, but the shaded areas are practically identical. The shape and folds of the cloth are also very similar. There are also differences, however, and one of the most important is the boy’s back, which is not as far forward in the watercolor. This imbues the painted figure with a more elegant and mannerist appearance that its etched predecessor. The presence of red, pink and blue flowers also enlivens the landscape. The watercolor has a greater number of rapid, nervous strokes in the plants on the right, and the white strip that seems to represent the sea in the etching is narrower in the painting, so that it is unclear whether or not it is, in fact, a body of water. The reduced role of this horizontal reference, the total visibility of the goat and the expansion of the foreground give the watercolor’s composition a freer and more floating feel than that of the print, which seems more solid and concentrated. The watercolor’s colorfulness accentuates that character, offering some very beautiful combinations, such as the blue flower on the dry red cloth with pink touches. The dominant tones, especially the combinations of whites and blues in the sky, are redolent of Tiepolo. Moreover, Fortuny’s free brushstrokes allow him to convey the goat’s thick and consistent hair while simultaneously rendering the plant stems with a fluid and rapid touch that accentuates their broken character in a manner that resembles the approach of Japanese artists whose work Fortuny was able to see at the Universal Exposition of 1867 in Paris. This pastoral motif was widely explored in painting from the second half of the 19th-century and reflects the reevaluation of classical Antiquity by various arts. In painting, the neo-Hellenic style was supported by the 2nd Empire in France and by Victorian society in Great Britain. Here, the subject allows the artist to depict a nude child in Nature, resulting in a very fresh work. Errazu owned a work that was exhibited with the title Faune endormi (Sleeping Faun) in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1878 Universal Exposition in Paris, which must be this one, if we understand the adjective to mean indolent or sleepy. Moreover, the child’s mussed hair and nudity allow us to identify him as a young faun. This work by Fortuny was well known, thanks to his own engraving, as well as its reproductions, and the etched copy that Miguel Seguí made in 1887 (Text drawn from Barón, J.: El legado Ramón de Errazu, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2005, pp. 116-119).