Boys at the watering place

A group of four men, one of them with his back turned, is in a field. One cuts the end of a cigarette with a penknife, another smokes, while the man on the left stubs out a cigarette butt on the ground. A dry tree and some bushes that can be seen on the left side of the engraving form the landscape in which the four male figures stand.

Goya used aquatint for the background of the print to suggest that the scene is taking place at night. He etched the figures in the engraving, leaving relatively large, clean areas on the clothes of the two men in the foreground who capture our attention.

The Ayala manuscript states that "the Andalusian smugglers, near a road, soon become bandits". The Prado Museum manuscript explains this image by pointing out that "the faces and costume are saying what they are". Likewise, the manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional comments that "the smugglers stalking all those who pass by, near a road, are little different from thieves".

This work, in which Goya may be criticising bandits or perhaps tobacco smuggling, must be related to one of the first tapestry cartoons the painter produced, entitled The Tobacco Guard.

Tobacco smuggling was quite common in that period, as Joseph Townsend (Clare Hall, 1739-1816), who was in Spain between 1786 and 1787, recalls (A Journey Through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787). According to the Englishman, the government had ostensibly increased the price of tobacco from 30 to 40 reales, which favoured the illegal trade in this product.

Other specialists have interpreted this image as a reference to the servants of the Treasury, i.e. the guards of the Tobacco Resguardo who tried to prevent smuggling and protect the revenue of the Treasury.

The protagonists of this engraving must be related to the bandits who lived in the Andalusian mountains described by William Jacob in 1810 (Travels in the South of Spain). It is also possible that Goya was familiar with the engravings that Antonio Alegre made from the drawings by Antonio Rodríguez, General collection of costumes currently in use in Spain in 1801. In particular, he must have taken a close look at the image of the smuggler, whose clothing clearly resembles the men in the Goya engraving.