Old Man Goya Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Old Man Goya Book

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 BrottonRead More

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  • Foyles

    In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted a serious illness which left him stone deaf. In this extraordinary book Julia Blackburn follows Goya through the remaining thirty-five years of his life. It was a time of political turmoil, of war, violence and confusion, and Goya transformed what he saw happening in the world around him into his visionary paintings, drawings and etchings. These were also years of tenderness for Goya, of intimate relationships with the Duchess of Alba and with Leocadia, his mistress, who was with him to the end. Julia Blackburn writes of the elderly painter with the intimacy of an old friend, seeing through his eyes and sharing the silence in his head, capturing perfectly his ferocious energy, his passion and his genius.

  • 0099437252
  • 9780099437253
  • Julia Blackburn
  • 3 April 2003
  • Vintage
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 288
  • New edition
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