Synopses & Reviews
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 artists world during this time. She recreates the artists 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.
About the Author
Julia Blackburn is the author of three books of nonfiction, Charles Waterton, The Emperors Last Island, and Daisy Bates in the Desert, and of two novels, The Book of Color and The Lepers Companions, both of which were shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She lives in England.