Old Man Goya
Julia Blackburn
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.
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About Julia Blackburn
Reviews for Old Man Goya
Irish Times
A near-perfect work... combines lyrical style with such exceptional imaginative power and intelligence
Sunday Times
Reading Ms Blackburn's work, you have the uncanny sensation that you have met Goya, felt his honest horny hands, watched him work
Economist
Julia Blackburn has developed her own technique for marrying the 'granite' of fact with the rainbow of personality... Her prose is elegant and precise, illuminated by intelligence, curiosity and a refined visual sense... When the book is closed, her evocation of the life and times of "old man Goya" lives on, a succession of brilliantly lit images in the mind's eye
Literary Review
Julia Blackburn has an extraordinary talent for thinking herself into other worlds... So vivid are her conjurings of lives lived elsewhere or long ago, you begin to suspect she sees ghosts
Marina Benjamin
Evening Standard
Few writers are as brave as Blackburn
Independent