Kalliope’s Reviews > Old Man Goya > Status Update

The old man on a swing seems to be a self-portrait... The old man wears a rumpled suit and a white shirt. His feet are bare and his calves are knotted with muscles. His face is filled with a look of a wild and private joy.

Goya sent Rosario (Weiss) to art lessons in Bordeaux...

.. Paris 1824...It is curious to realise that while Delacroix was making copies of the Caprichos and a printing firm was producing an edition of six very poor imitations of the etchings, but no one was aware of the deaf old man who was pottering through the backstreets of the city, busy with beggars and acrobats and the smiles of prostitutes.

Underneath the painting The Pilgrimage to San Isidoro (La romería de San Isidro - not Isidoro), in which a terrible crowd of men and women blunder through the moon-dark hills following a guitar player, there are traces of a wide panorama of mountain ranges where a great bridge with three arches crosses a bridge.

On the Disparates..




No prints were ever taken from these plates and when Goya had to leave Spain they were wrapped up and put away in a cupboard. No one knew of their existence until long after his death.

In that moment the crowd of men and women and children (in a bullfight) roared together in a single voice of exultation. And in that moment Goya could hear them. The sound vibrated along the wooden bench on which he was sitting. It sipped into the bones of his buttocks, it rose up through his spine, tickling him like the stirring of sexual desire, and it burst into his head, making him roar with the rest of them.

3/3

In a private notebook he drew a little caricature of the Duke of Wellington as a strutting peacock of vanity.

2/3
He made another and more intimate portrait of Wellington during 1812: the long equine face staring blankly outwards as if seeing a ghost....

1/2
Goya produced commissioned work when it was asked of him. In an equestrian portrait he rubbed out the face of the deposed Bonaparte King Joseph and replaced it with the face of the Duke of Wellington.

During that same time when sudden and unnecessary death was spreading everywhere across the country and the rustle and scratch of famine was beginning to creep through the streets of Madrid, Goya made a series of still lifes.