Behind the Book- Julia Blackburn's Old Man Goya: Being Francisco de Goya

Julia Blackburn remembers standing frozen in front of Spanish painter Francisco de Goya's "Black" paintings during her first visit to Madrid's Prado Museum four years ago. She didn't so much marvel at the work—as a child she had stolen a book of his etchings from her mother's studio—as at the artist's having gone stone cold deaf before he painted it. "I was fascinated," says Blackburn by phone from her home in England. "His deafness seemed to help make him see more clearly."

Blackburn has been both praised and criticized for her unique approach to biography, in which she combines known facts with memoir and fiction. But her aim is to bring her subjects back to life, to imagine what it was like to have been in their skin, tasted their foods, seen their sights. Previous subjects include Napoleon (The Emperor's Last Island, Pantheon, 1992) and Daisy Bates (Daisy Bates in the Desert, Pantheon, 1994), an Irishwoman who studied the Aborigines in the early 1900s. In her newest work, Old Man Goya (see review on p. 94), she ponders the silence of the deaf and particularly the inner life of this great Spanish painter.

The daughter of poet Thomas Blackburn and painter Rosalie de Meric (to whom the book is dedicated), Blackburn found that her early life gave her the tools to consider this legendary figure. "I watched a lot of people painting, not just my mother, so I have always wanted to write about a painter," she observes. "It was a challenge to write about somebody as enormous as Goya, but I did know what it was like to look at paintings before I had the words to describe them."

In Old Man Goya, Blackburn continues her tendency to blur the boundary between fantasy and reality as she investigates Goya's life from age 47, when he lost his hearing, until his death in Bordeaux in 1828. His deafness came during the Peninsular War, the peak of Spain's most savage conflict with the English and the French and an integral theme of Goya's most shocking works. "I wanted to show that what Goya was painting was as much a documentary of his world as it was a comment on his own state of mind," says Blackburn. "A lot of writers interpret his work as his own private nightmare."

To capture the gore and the macabre of post-Inquisition Spain, Blackburn immersed herself in military and travel books of the time. To find Goya the man, she pored over his sketchbooks and letters. She also read books on deafness and biographies of Goya by classic art historians such as Sara Symmons and Janis Tomlinson. It bothered her how little some of these biographies spoke about Goya's emotional life after he lost his hearing. "They don't mention his new methods of communication and how his intensity would have changed," notes Blackburn, "so I reread a lot of the material to try and understand how he related to the world."

Blackburn, who lives in England's coastal county of Suffolk, traveled to Spain to supplement her research during the three years it took for her to enter into Goya's mind. A proud speaker of "pidgin Spanish," she claims that she had no language problems during her visits to small villages. Mostly, she roamed around in silence, trying to capture the experience of Goya's inability to communicate with others. "The funny thing about looking for someone long since dead," muses Blackburn, "is that you're looking for what you can still see now that would have been seen then. Like a view from a window, the nature of the courtyard or the starlings on the roof—the eternals that don't change with the generations."

"I try to get really intimate with my subject to the point that I'm almost remembering his life," elaborates Blackburn. "Then, when I start writing I can mix my own recollection with the historical facts and not have to shift between the past and the present." Indeed, it's as if Blackburn had channeled the spirit of the brusque and solitary Goya, experiencing him as a father, misfit, husband, lover, and critic of humanity. In contrast to flat and dispassionate portrayals of Goya often given us by art historians, Blackburn unleashes the artist's fears, vanity, and primal desires to show us a man as complex as his oeuvre.