Merienda a orillas del Manzanares [Picnic At the Edge of the Manzanares River] is a painting for a tapestry intended for the dining room of the Prince and Princess of Asturias in the San Lorenzo Palace in Madrid.
Goya described the subject as a merienda, a snack, or a light meal, and the Museo del Prado has retitled it The Picnic because Goya’s merienda is not a snack. The cloth is laden with a copper stockpot, ceramic casserole, pewter serving plates, glass tumblers, ham, roast chicken (?), cheese, and bread. There is much to drink, and the picnickers are most likely drunk. 
Merienda already had a history in Spain and France, but Goya insisted this subject was his invention. Merienda first appears as a snack in the picaresque novel The Life of Lazarillo De Tormes, an alfresco lunch in Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha and Quevedo’s El Buscon. Goya was likely aware of the French vogue for midday a hunt picnic and repas de pique-nique, popularized by Watteau and others. He adapted their aristocratic subjects for more ordinary people.
Selecting from his resources, Goya’s merienda presents us with a convivial group of four mojos and a woman sitting around a white cloth on the hillside above the river at a picnic. The woman in blue seems dreamy as she sips wine and ignores the young men, majos, who, based on their clothing, suggest theatrical stock figures, such as an aristocrat, soldier, hunter, etc., who are seemingly drunk and flirting with a young woman, a maja, carrying a basket of oranges, who may be a prostitute or an innocent. Nevertheless, two men lift their tumblers to toast her beauty while she coolly regards them. Though she may be embarrassed by their effrontery, her hand points towards the backside of a dog chewing on picnic refuse. (Perhaps Goya’s not-so-sly joke.)
* Goya’s other picnic paintings are La Pradera del San Isidro [The Meadow of Saint Isidor], also in the Museo Nacional del Prado, and A Picnic in the National Gallery, London
Featured Image: Merienda a orillas del Manzanares
See Francesco de Goya. Merienda a orillas del Manzanares [aka The Picnic or The Picnic At the Edge of the Manzanares River] (1776), oil on canvas. Museo del Prado, Madrid; Janis A. Tomlinson. Francisco Goya; the Tapestry Cartoons and Early Career at the Court of Madrid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.