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)
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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