Old Man Goya
  • Published: 2 June 2003
  • ISBN: 9780099437253
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $24.99

Old Man Goya

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Jul 2010
Paperback
2 Jun 2003
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'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.
  • Published: 2 June 2003
  • ISBN: 9780099437253
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Julia Blackburn

Julia Blackburn is an author and scriptwriter whose radio plays include A Good Death, Betsy and Napoleon, The Need for Nonsense and The Spellbound Horses.

Also by Julia Blackburn

Dreaming the Karoo
Time Song
Threads
Thin Paths
The Need For Nonsense
The Three of Us
My Animals and Other Family
See all

Praise for Old Man Goya

Sensitive and intelligent... Julia Blackburn has steeped herself in her subject and in the period

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
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