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Old Man Goya

Julia Blackburn

$24.99

Paperback

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English
Vintage
02 June 2003
'Blackburn rescues the man from inside the madman. She redeems a lost life' - The Times

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.
By:  
Imprint:   Vintage
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 130mm,  Spine: 17mm
Weight:   180g
ISBN:   9780099437253
ISBN 10:   0099437252
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Reviews for Old Man Goya

Blackburn was introduced to Goya by her mother, a painter, who kept a small paperback edition of his etchings in her bookcase. So, as her mother lay dying, Blackburn sought to bring the painter she most associated with her back to life. This book, therefore, is about two people, separated by almost 200 years. Julia Blackburn (21st-century British writer) and Francisco de Goya (early 19th-century Spanish painter) cohabit almost every page. At the age of 47, Goya went profoundly deaf, and it is from here on that Blackburn has chosen to join up with him. She details the royal paintings and many etchings he made over his last 35 years until his death in 1828. With the help of a pair of earplugs, she writes about the old painter's world as seen without sound: screaming faces with no voice emerging, barking dogs baring soundless open jaws, the silence of a frenzied crowd. She traces his footsteps through Spain and France, staying in the same villages he stayed in; watching a bullfight as he did, pretending he is sitting just in front of her; even eating the same food as she imagined he ate and letting us know how it tasted. In all of this detailed, lucid writing, she reveals not only the painter's life but her own discovery of him. Blackburn does not pretend to be objective; she only shows us Goya through her own eyes, describing incidents in his life, even his most intimate moments ('warming his cold feet between her thighs'), with the confidence of someone who knows the old man well. Many assertions are undocumented and often unsubstantiated by anything other than the author's own intuition. Yet still we believe them completely. Mere facts never give a full picture of a person's life, as this affectionate portrait shows. Review by Dea Birkett (Kirkus UK)


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