Old Man Goya - Hardcover

Blackburn, Julia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224062794 ISBN 13: 9780224062794

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2002

Synopsis

An intimate account of the life of Francisco de Goya from 1792 when he was 47 and contracted a serious illness which left him totally deaf. Through a time of political turmoil, war, violence and confusion, Goya continued to work, transforming the scenes he witnessed into his visionary paintings, drawings and etchings. Also detailed are Goya's lovers - the Duchess of Alba and Leocadia who was with him at the end. This is ultimately a tale of the ferocious energy, passion and genius of this great artist.

About this title

Review:

Julia Blackburn has already established herself as one of the finest writers of non-fiction, but with Old Man Goya she takes her ability to re-create the past to a new level in her haunting evocation of the final years of the great Spanish painter, Francisco de Goya. Partly inspired by the painful loss her own mother (who was also a painter), Blackburn's desire to write about Goya developed when she learnt that in 1792, at the age of 47, the painter went permanently deaf; "I wanted to know what sort of world this deaf man had inhabited and how he had managed to live with the isolation of deafness and how it had changed the way he used his remaining senses". The result is a remarkably perceptive voyage into Goya's mind, which hovers between history and fiction, as Blackburn moves between the death of her own mother, visits to Goya's old haunts in Spain and France, and the painter's own remarkable lust for life in the midst of domestic upheavals and the horrors of warfare in early 19th-century Spain.

Old Man Goya moves from Goya's early days as a rich court painter, creating "dozens of designs of light-hearted subjects", to the trauma of deafness, the devastation of the bloody Peninsula War that swept Iberia between 1807 and 1812, the death of his first wife and old age with a mistress half his age. Interspersed amongst the text are 23 beautiful Goya copperplates through which Blackburn "can see Goya, a silent witness who makes no comment, but gives a shape to everything he sees", whose relish for the absurd, the cruel and the carnivalesque remained with him throughout his long life. Blackburn's elegant prose and unerring eye for domestic and artistic detail creates a wonderfully compassionate portrait of Goya, and she happily concedes to being "caught up in the spinning energy of the man as he hurtled relentlessly through the years", a journey that her readers will find well worth pursuing. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

Blackburn's breakthrough book: an astonishing portrait of a painter and his world.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0224062794
• ISBN 13: 9780224062794
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 239