9780375705793

Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed:

• 30 Day Return Policy
• Bookseller Guarantee
• Privacy & Security Policy

In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted an illness that left him stone deaf. Yet he continued to interact with the world and to create, spending the next thirty-five years in a world emptied of sound but bursting with images of pageantry, cruelty, and pathos.

In this brilliant, idiosyncratic book – a kaleidoscope of biography, memoir, history, and meditation – Julia Blackburn vividly imagines the artist’s world during this time. She recreates the artist’s friendships and love affairs and breathes life into the subjects of his paintings: an ethereally lovely duchess; the spoiled grotesques of the Bourbon court; the atrocities of the Napoleonic wars. Old Man Goya is a rare work of empathy and imagination, a stunning portrait of the mind and life of a great artist.

"Blackburn's prose is elegant and precise, illuminated by intelligence, curiosity and a refined visual sense....Her fascination with the grotesque and tactile, combined with the slow and often dreamlike narrative, beautifully conveys the changed reality of the newly deaf painter. But how accurate is her portrait of Goya? As a psychological study, it lacks complexity....At times I felt that I was exploring Blackburn's mind rather than her subject's. The most captivating moments of the book are personal...."

Pamela Norris, Literary Review, April 2002

"[S]ometimes extraordinary and sometimes, for a variety of reasons, less successful. It is a high-risk enterprise....What she has written is less a biography than a journey, partly external and partly internal...."

Richard Eder, New York Times, 05/22/2002

Old Man Goya: Search Results