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Francisco Goya: A Life
The author of Son of the Morning Star and Deus Lo Volt probes the mind of the Spanish painter, reconstructing the violent, repressive Spain he called home and charting his powerful influence on Western art.
This biography of Francisco Goya breaks the mold--recounting with stunning immediacy the uncommon genius behind the renowned Spanish painter. Darkly brilliant and casually masterful in turn, Francisco Goya changed art forever. During the days of the Spanish Inquisition, Goya painted royalty, street urchins, and demons with the same brush, bringing his own distinctive touch to each. This unusual man and his ghastly times are the perfect subject for Evan S. Connell, one of our greatest and least conventional writers. Introducing a wealth of detail and a cast of comic characters--a motley group of dukes, queens, and artists, as lewd and incorrigible a crew as history has ever produced--Connell has conjured Goya's life with wit, erudition, and a sparkling imagination.
This biography of Francisco Goya breaks the mold--recounting with stunning immediacy the uncommon genius behind the renowned Spanish painter. Darkly brilliant and casually masterful in turn, Francisco Goya changed art forever. During the days of the Spanish Inquisition, Goya painted royalty, street urchins, and demons with the same brush, bringing his own distinctive touch to each. This unusual man and his ghastly times are the perfect subject for Evan S. Connell, one of our greatest and least conventional writers. Introducing a wealth of detail and a cast of comic characters--a motley group of dukes, queens, and artists, as lewd and incorrigible a crew as history has ever produced--Connell has conjured Goya's life with wit, erudition, and a sparkling imagination.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published December 18, 2003
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About the author
Evan S. Connell
64 books157 followersEvan Shelby Connell Jr. (August 17, 1924 – January 10, 2013) was a U.S. novelist, poet, and short-story writer. His writing covered a variety of genres, although he published most frequently in fiction.
In 2009, Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, for lifetime achievement. On April 23, 2010, he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize: the Robert Kirsch Award, for "a living author with a substantial connection to the American West, whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition."
Connell was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the only son of Evan S. Connell, Sr. (1890–1974), a physician, and Ruth Elton Connell. He had a sister Barbara (Mrs. Matthew Zimmermann) to whom he dedicated his novel Mrs. Bridge (1959). He graduated from Southwest High School in Kansas City in 1941. He started undergraduate work at Dartmouth College but joined the Navy in 1943 and became a pilot. After the end of World War II, he graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947, with a B.A. in English. He studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York and Stanford University in California. He never married, and lived and worked in Sausalito, California for decades.
(Wikipedia)
In 2009, Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, for lifetime achievement. On April 23, 2010, he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize: the Robert Kirsch Award, for "a living author with a substantial connection to the American West, whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition."
Connell was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the only son of Evan S. Connell, Sr. (1890–1974), a physician, and Ruth Elton Connell. He had a sister Barbara (Mrs. Matthew Zimmermann) to whom he dedicated his novel Mrs. Bridge (1959). He graduated from Southwest High School in Kansas City in 1941. He started undergraduate work at Dartmouth College but joined the Navy in 1943 and became a pilot. After the end of World War II, he graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947, with a B.A. in English. He studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York and Stanford University in California. He never married, and lived and worked in Sausalito, California for decades.
(Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
December 28, 2009
While the book has many interesting facts and is well written, there are a couple items that I consider major hinderances. First, the book's title is rather misleading. One assumes the book to discuss Goya's life and work as the central focal point. The title does suggest the discussion of more secondary items, but one would assume "life & times" to focus on how the times influenced Goya's work. Instead we are given snippets of Goya's presence as a way to join together historical figures Connell is interested in. Unfortunately, Goya is not fleshed out enough to serve as the center piece of this work. I often read several pages before remembering that the book is supposed to be about Goya. Quite simply there is not enough of a connection between the content of the book and Goya for this to be marketed as a book about Goya. Further to this point, there is little examination of Goya's work, or what inspired it. At best the reader gets a hint of what is going on in Goya's world. Lastly, Connell's own comments randomly appear throughout the book with little context, and are always out of place. One gets the sense that Connell is recording what he has read and adding brief insights similar to a journal or work of fiction, rather than a nonfiction work about an artist.
As an artist myself, I had been interested in this book to learn about Goya, the world he lived in, and how it influenced his work. While I finished the book and found some facts of history interesting, the book I was hoping to read was sorely missing. A rather shallow attempt at art history.
As an artist myself, I had been interested in this book to learn about Goya, the world he lived in, and how it influenced his work. While I finished the book and found some facts of history interesting, the book I was hoping to read was sorely missing. A rather shallow attempt at art history.
October 3, 2009
This book by Evan Connell, author of "Son of the Morning Star", is not your typical biography of Goya the artist; rather it is a history of Goya's life and times. The book covers periods of Goya’s life in Spain and what was going on around Goya during his life time. It’s a fun, interesting and easy to read book although there is not a single drawing or image of a single work of art by Goya. This spoilt the book for me a little, for a book on an artist to have no pictures of his work is very annoying to say the least. I ended up grabbing my copy of Robert Hughes book on Goya to check out the paintings as they were mentioned in the narrative of Connell's book. However if you enjoy a narrative history with lots of interesting bits of information on people and places associated with Goya this is a book you will enjoy.
May 18, 2025
Very readable, and engagingly written with humour and character. However, often historical detail and local colour takes over and there's not enough goya and not enough art. And there are no pictures. Artist bios should always have pictures! Borrow a nice book of his works to reference alongside this one.
February 3, 2008
Connell has written some great books, including the novels Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge and the brilliant study of George Armstrong Custer, The Son of the Morningstar, but this is less a biography than a gloss on a biography. Wry and churlish; insightful and superficial, the slim book is herky-jerky, a bit smug, even condescending at times, and most regrettably shallow. Connell still writes some fine sentences and his erudition can pop wisdom like a toaster but sometimes he shows off in baldly embarrassing ways (“…the twentieth-century restorative efforts of the Buffet brothers—French artists whose work brings to mind Puvis de Chavannes”) and sometimes he appears simply lazy both in his analysis and his prose—often he tells us more on that later without necessarily doing that and he uses and reuses a rhetorical device where he states something to the effect that this will do it right. No.
January 15, 2015
I probably shouldn't have read this simultaneously with Robert Hughes' marvelous biography of Goya. But that still wouldn't made it a more enjoyable read. Too witty and clever by half, belabored with extraneous quotations by a variety of turgid know-it-alls, and (although I suppose it isn't entirely fair to level this criticism) not a single illustration or reproduction with which to break up the spotty prose. Less than half the length of Hughes' biography, I found it a long slog, although there were a few interesting anecdotes buried here and there.
January 18, 2015
The book is entertainingly written, but it's more of a history of the Spanish court and the struggles with France than it is a biography of Goya. Also, the author goes into discussions of paintings, but gives scant descriptions. This and the fact that there are no plates or pictures means that I spent a considerable amount of time on my phone looking up the paintings to which he referred.
August 14, 2019
Almost more of a miscellany than a biography. The authors skips lightly through Goya's life and his influence. Lots of bright shiny objects to file away. I would happily read whatever Evan S. Connell has written.
May 9, 2022
Hilarious descriptions of the royal families. I suggest looking at Goya's paintings--King Charles with his tiny head and Bourbon nose, his nymphomaniac of a wife, her children the spitting image of the secretary of state...
August 9, 2021
Gute Biografie von Francisco Goya. Lehrreich und gut geschrieben.
November 17, 2024
I have seen the film but I would like to read it instead. In my country isn’t available.
September 17, 2009
If you're going to read only one book on Goya, read this one too. Robert Hughes set the standard and this appreciative volume cannot compete, but if you want more Goya, if you want to think more about Goya and his life and art, Connell is a decent companion.
August 11, 2007
I'm finding this one kinda lame...and way too casual and colloquial...and not in a good way.
April 19, 2017
I had greatly admired Connell's 2001 Deus Lo Volt!: A Chronicle of the Crusades, a stunning conversion of actual manuscripts from the 11th century crusades into a readable, immersing novel. He had also written Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn which, if I had wanted to read about Custer, would have been the book I’d have picked up. I could count on him not to sanctify the scene. Joyce Carol Oates has called Connell “‘one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers.”
So what had drawn him to Goya, I wondered? The charged response to the fighting in Spain in 1808, as I have been, or to the court painter, or the madness of his last-in-life black paintings, with the impossible to look-at “Saturn Devouring His Son? The volume didn’t look like a full, scholarly biography, of which there were many notable ones in any case, by Robert Hughes Goya, and Lion Feuchtwanger, Goya or Fred Licht’s Goya for a detailed look at the paintings, to name but a few.) Nor would I expect Connell to write one, given his other work. But what, then?
I’m sorry to say that while I was informed, I was not engaged. Connell settles on a telegraphic style of short factual statements without narrative linkage. We get impressionistic images along with often breezy commentary. “April 1823. Here come the French troops again.” “During their life together Josefa was pregnant more often than not, which indicates they got a long pretty well.” “Riego was shot or hanged” “Whether he traveled by diligence or on horseback has been argued.”
While there are references to the paintings, there is no list of them so one cannot find particular works to see what Connell has to say, or where he puts them. No illustrations. No Index.
“Another painting of the Infante’s wife is almost Japanese” (Which one, when? Go find it)
He takes frequent detours, though in the same flow of text, so in the middle of one section of Goya’s life we find that Garcia Lorca (100 years later) was fascinated by him. We hear that Connell attended a celebration known as Tamboradas to herald in Good Friday in Goya’s home village of Fuendotodos, but no mention of whether Goya ever participated in it, painted it or even knew of it.
For more about Goya's 1808 paintings and etchings of war, and the rest of the review, see http://www.allinoneboat.org/2017/04/1...
So what had drawn him to Goya, I wondered? The charged response to the fighting in Spain in 1808, as I have been, or to the court painter, or the madness of his last-in-life black paintings, with the impossible to look-at “Saturn Devouring His Son? The volume didn’t look like a full, scholarly biography, of which there were many notable ones in any case, by Robert Hughes Goya, and Lion Feuchtwanger, Goya or Fred Licht’s Goya for a detailed look at the paintings, to name but a few.) Nor would I expect Connell to write one, given his other work. But what, then?
I’m sorry to say that while I was informed, I was not engaged. Connell settles on a telegraphic style of short factual statements without narrative linkage. We get impressionistic images along with often breezy commentary. “April 1823. Here come the French troops again.” “During their life together Josefa was pregnant more often than not, which indicates they got a long pretty well.” “Riego was shot or hanged” “Whether he traveled by diligence or on horseback has been argued.”
While there are references to the paintings, there is no list of them so one cannot find particular works to see what Connell has to say, or where he puts them. No illustrations. No Index.
“Another painting of the Infante’s wife is almost Japanese” (Which one, when? Go find it)
He takes frequent detours, though in the same flow of text, so in the middle of one section of Goya’s life we find that Garcia Lorca (100 years later) was fascinated by him. We hear that Connell attended a celebration known as Tamboradas to herald in Good Friday in Goya’s home village of Fuendotodos, but no mention of whether Goya ever participated in it, painted it or even knew of it.
For more about Goya's 1808 paintings and etchings of war, and the rest of the review, see http://www.allinoneboat.org/2017/04/1...
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews