Old Man Goya

by Julia Blackburn

  During this same period he produces over a hundred drawings and perhaps many more that have since been lost. He learns to master the new techniques of lithography. He experiments with miniature painting on pieces of ivory. He makes a number of full-size portraits and several still lifes which he does ‘between two cigarettes’. As he explains in a letter to a friend in his funny, laconic style, ‘You must be grateful to me for these poorly written lines, since I have neither sight nor pulse nor pen nor inkwell, I lack everything but my will power and that I have in excess.’

  Sometimes, as now, I am daunted by him. I am daunted by his deafness, his self-containment, his genius and by the world he inhabited which is so far away from me. Then all I can do is to search for things I can hold on to; familiar images that might make me feel more at ease in his company.

  I remind myself that I have known him since I first met his Caprichos etchings when I was still too young to put thoughts into words. I bring back the memory of the smell of linseed oil and turpentine in my mother’s studio, breathing it in until my head spins. I wonder again why her paintings frightened me, whereas his were somehow reassuring, even when they were at their most savage.

  I move steadily along this path of recollection until I reach my mother’s quiet death and that helps to prepare me for Goya’s death, which was also quiet, with friends standing around, watching the process of his departure. I look at his self-portraits, the way his face moves from youth into old age, the way he sees himself differently as the years progress.

  As part of the exorcism of the doubts that can so easily crowd around me, I return in my mind to the places I have visited because of Goya. I look again at the landscape of white stone and yellow earth that surrounds the village where he was born. I hear the drums beating like fear itself in the nearby town of Calanda, and I see the mass of people all dressed in the costumes of the Inquisition. I watch the jostling starlings that are still singing crazily on the rooftops of the Duchess of Alba’s farmhouse. I walk through the streets of Madrid, Zaragoza, Cadiz and finally of Bordeaux. I arrive at the door of the house in which Goya died, climb the long spiralling staircase, enter the room, look out of the window. I go to the church where his funeral service was held and to the cemetery where his body was first buried.

  Slowly and almost imperceptibly I find myself becoming more calm. And then I am back with the image of an old man. He is a few paces ahead of me, walking along the street that used to be called the Street of the Little Moles, because of the many prostitutes who were to be found there, burrowing in the darkness like moles. He wears his cloth cap and pauses to greet the women who all know him by name.

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  Goya stayed in Bordeaux for only three days and then he set off at once for Paris, ‘to consult the physicians’ there. He had a provisional travelling pass granted to him by the Sub-Prefect of Bayonne, as well as the address of the lithographic studio he wanted to visit and a letter of introduction to a Spanish lawyer who might be able to help him if he ever felt he needed help. He gave no indication of when he was planning to return, although Moratin warned that a winter in Paris would be the death of him and so he had better get back before the cold weather set in.

  Perhaps he was able to book a seat on one of the two new mail coaches known as the Twin Sisters, which could do the trip in fifty-eight hours, but failing that – and he always disliked making arrangements in advance – the journey in the old coach would take three days.

  I was reading a contemporary guide for travellers in France and it explained how, before setting off, all passengers had to wait until their name and seat number were called out. I could suddenly see Goya standing beside his luggage, which consisted of little else but drawing and painting materials; his lower jaw juts forward and the grey curls escape from under his cap. Because he avoided letting people know that he was deaf they might now think he was slightly mad: listening so intently with his eyes and yet failing to make any response when he was supposed to.

  Something seemed to change in him from the moment he crossed the border from Spain to France. Perhaps he lost the last vestiges of fear. He had let go of so much already and now the danger of travelling to unknown destinations, the isolation of his deafness, the vulnerability of his ageing body, all seemed like irrelevant details as he waited impatiently to see what each new day had to offer.

  So off he went, trundling across a new landscape and this time all that I’ll give him on the way is the ghostly apparition of a team of oxen wrapped in white linen cloth to protect them from the biting flies that were so vicious in the low marshlands.

  Then he was in Paris. He made drawings of the sights that appealed to him: the mastiff dogs used to pull handcarts, dressed in harness like miniature horses; a woman being carried in a shoulder seat fixed to a man’s back; a beggar who had lost both his legs, propelling himself along the street on a wooden platform attached to four wheels which he turned by hand.

  He went to the home of the lawyer González Arnau who found him accommodation in the Hotel Favart, opposite the Italian Opera House and near the Boulevard du Temple, which was bursting with fairground activity by day and by night. A billboard stuck to a wall advertised a trapeze act at the Funambules Theatre. Goya could not read French, but he could see Madame Saqui displaying her acrobatic skills on the high wire and there was a date and a time underneath the precarious balance of her little feet.

  Ever since Ferdinand’s return to power in 1823 there had been a steady stream of Spanish political exiles and refugees seeking asylum in France. The French tolerated the situation but monitored it carefully and kept detailed reports on anyone who might be liable to cause trouble – over four thousand reports were collected during the first six months of 1824. So in spite of the fact that Goya was still the official Court Painter and all his papers were in order, the Minister of the Interior was immediately informed of his arrival and he in turn sent his instructions to the Prefect of Police in Paris:

  This Spaniard … is making his way to Paris and is to visit the spas of the Vosges. It would be interesting to see whether during his stay in Paris D. Francisco de Goya enters into any suspicious relations which his position with the Spanish Court would make even more improper. To this end, you should keep him under a close but discreet surveillance, keeping me informed of the results and forewarning me of his departure from Paris.

  The first report on Goya stated that ‘This foreigner arrived in Paris on 30 June and found lodgings at number 5, Rue de Marivaux. He never receives guests and the difficulties he has in speaking and understanding the French language keep him mostly in his hotel, which he leaves only to visit monuments and walk in public places. He looks older than his seventy [sic] years and is moreover extremely deaf.’ Obviously he was not considered as any kind of threat and nothing more was written about him until the day of his return to Bordeaux.

  Goya enjoyed Paris. The hotel was ideally suited to his purposes because it was in such a busy area. From his window he could watch the people milling like flies around the Opera House and in a few minutes he could walk to the Boulevard du Temple where the floating poor of the city went to be entertained. Here was a seller of rolled wafers who cried ‘This way for pleasure’, a man sandwiched between two boards advertising the Paris to Lyon coach service, coconut sellers and dog shearers and puppet shows and a stall with performing fleas and another displaying the mad elastic faces of the professional grimacers. A panorama by Robert Fulton provided circular views of some of the capital cities of the world, while a diorama in the Boulevard Saint Martin showed an interview between King Ferdinand and the Duke of Angoulême. There was tightrope walking at the Funambules and at the Tivoli Theatre the aeronaut Nargat was launched into space from a cannon and returned to earth mounted on the back of a deer. Goya made drawings of what he saw.

  Although he met the lawyer Arnau who resolved to do his best for the ‘young traveller’, as he jokingly referred to him in a letter, it is not known if Goya ever went to one of
Arnau’s grand soirées where the elite among the Spanish exiles gathered together. Certainly he had no portrait commissions from any of them. He did make a portrait of his friend the banker Joaquim Ferrer and of his wife Manuela and he presented them with a pencil sketch of himself in profile wearing his cloth cap and a beautiful painting of a country bullfight in which a wounded bull stares quietly at a wounded horse in the moments before the next stage of the slaughter begins. He must have done the painting in his hotel room and maybe the portraits as well.

  He might have gone to the Louvre, which was also very close to where he was staying, but what he thought of what he saw is anyone’s guess. He made no mention of the new work by Delacroix, Ingres or Constable that was on show at the Salon Exhibition of 1824, but he did refer to someone he called ‘the incomparable Monsieur Martin’ a deaf-mute miniaturist whose work has all been lost. It is curious to realise that during this same time 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.

  Apart from the pleasure he took from watching street life, Goya’s main purpose in Paris was to visit ‘friend Cardano’, whom he had met in Madrid in 1819 and who was now an exile here. José Maria Cardano had previously taught him the basic principles of the art of lithography, but Goya was eager to learn the latest developments in technique. Together they could visit dye merchants, workshops and suppliers of lithographic material. The possibilities of lithography suited Goya perfectly and as well as producing several prints when he was back in Bordeaux he developed a new drawing style in which he used only the greasy lithographic crayon and black chalk to make images that seem to materialise out of the shimmering energy of smoke.

  I like to think that while he was in Paris he happened to meet Don Manuel Godoy, the former Prince of Peace and Universal Minister who joined Queen Maria Luisa and her husband the King during their years of exile in France. Maria Luisa died in 1819, complaining bitterly about the rain and her own despair and Charles IV followed soon after. Godoy then came to Paris and took an apartment close to the Hotel Favart. He spent his time dictating his memoirs and walking in the Jardin de Tuileries. I would have the two of them meeting by chance and then strolling side by side along the tree-lined boulevards that led to the park. They could sit on a bench in the sunshine, and feed the pigeons; Godoy with the face of a well-fed tomcat, perplexed by the way that destiny had dumped him; Goya with the face of a shrewd old peasant, delighted by the way that destiny had given him this last burst of freedom.

  (illustration credit 33.1)

  On 1 September 1824, the Minister of the Interior was informed that ‘Don Francisco de Goya, a Spanish painter aged seventy-eight, who has been the subject of various communications, has obtained the necessary visa to go to Bordeaux’.

  For the first two weeks in Bordeaux he was on his own and then Leocadia and her two children came to join him. They rented a hotel apartment on the Cours de Tourny, close to the small popular theatres in the Allées de Tourny, and to the halls in Quinconces where all kinds of human oddities were on display. On their first evening together he could take Leocadia and Rosario to see the man who swallowed live mice and the Incombustible Arab, recently arrived from Paris, who climbed into a hot oven and emerged from it carrying a roasted chicken.

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  I can’t help thinking that Goya had never been so happy as he was now in Bordeaux. He could not speak the French language and so he had no need to explain that he could not hear it either. He had the uncertainty of a six-month visa which might or might not be renewed. The money he had saved and his income as Court Painter was all tied up in investments which gave him the freedom of feeling poor, even though this was far from the case. He had no paintings with him to impress potential clients and no possessions either, except for the few things he had been able to bring on the coach from Madrid. So here he was at the age of seventy-eight, staying in rented hotel accommodation with his thirty-six-year-old mistress and her ten-year-old daughter who was surely his daughter too.

  An old man cut loose from his own past. An old man living with a woman who was forty-two years younger than himself: her face as pale and perfect as the moon, her body as ripe as a fruit. The poet Moratin said in a letter that the two of them did not seem to be very harmonious when they were first reunited, but by the next letter they had settled down. They were a very well-matched couple. Leocadia ‘at times scolds and at times enjoys herself … [She] does not miss a single circus performance and goes to all the fairs’, while Goya is ‘celebrated for his restlessness, his angers, his passions; he is full of curiosity … taking a lively interest in circus animals, acrobats and monsters’.

  People writing about Goya have been very critical of Leocadia. In spite of the fact that she originally came from a wealthy and well-respected family, she is often described as nothing more than a servant or housekeeper, who could not have presumed to share her master’s bed. Or the fact of her acrimonious divorce from her husband and Moratin’s few brief words about her are used to turn her into a shrew and a bully. But if you listen to the dignified anguish in the letters she wrote after Goya’s death or look at the pictures he made of young women with pale moon faces and heavy feminine bodies, their skin soft and glittering with sexual warmth, then you feel that she was the root of his new-found contentment and the reason why he could sail towards death with such a carefree ease.

  There was also Rosario, the Ladybird, to make him happy. Goya had given her drawing lessons when they were all still living in the House of the Deaf Man. He cut out figures in paper for her to trace and drew things he thought she might like to copy. Some of these joint efforts have survived and you can see her wavering line struggling to keep up with him, like a child following an adult’s footsteps in the snow. Here she completes a figure that he has started and here she fills in a solid mass of shadow without completely understanding how that shadow was formed. I imagine them sitting side by side in one of those rooms where the huge Black Paintings roar and chatter from the walls. They are very impressed by each other’s skills and delighted by the way that these skills can combine to make a single image. Together they produce a clown with his arms akimbo and his mouth painted in a round O of surprise and then very tentatively Rosario attempts to produce that same clown on her own. They do a group of children tugging at a little cart, a fat smiling monk, a man on his deathbed.

  People writing about Goya get as cross with Rosario as they do with Leocadia. They mock her lack of technical ability, ignoring the fact that she is only six, seven, eight years old at the time. They hate her for daring to interfere with the master’s work, as if she was disrespectful, or was trying to deceive future generations of art historians. Some of her early drawings have even been attributed to Goya, which is surely a measure of her success as an imitator. And when she was only twelve she made a beautiful lithograph of the man she considered as her father; it makes him look more like a shopkeeper than a famous artist and shows the stubbornness of him in the protruding lower jaw gripped as tight as a trap. But I have only seen this picture reproduced once in all the many illustrated books I have looked at.

  When Rosario was sent to stay with the architect Tiburcio she took on the task of making copies of all the plates from the Caprichos etchings. She worked with charcoal and Indian ink to produce a series of images that are curiously flat and lifeless but are nevertheless very sophisticated. She was so dedicated in her labours that she could produce three or four of these copies in a single day. It must have been a way of missing this old man whom she loved, concentrating her thoughts on him without the confusion of words. A fragile nine-year-old, with pale golden curls and delicate features, studying the faces of those men with padlocked ears, the monster holding a pair of scissors, the women plucking chickens who have the faces of men, the witches, the masks
, the nightmares of deformity. I think of myself at that same age, studying those pictures and being strangely reassured by them. Later Rosario will present Goya with what she has done, confident of his approval and praise.

  In Bordeaux, less than a month after moving into Monsieur Bérard’s hotel on the Cours de Tourny, Goya wrote to his friend Ferrer in Paris, full of pride in Rosario’s skill and plans for her future:

  This famous little creature wants to learn to paint miniatures, and this is also what I want her to do, for at her age the most important thing in the world is for her to do what she wants … I would like to send her to Paris for a while, and I would like you to take care of her as if she were my own daughter; and I can pay you with my work or with money from my accounts. I am sending you a small sample of the things she can do; it has amazed all the teachers in Madrid and I hope it will do the same in Paris.

  It was possibly because Rosario wanted to do miniatures that Goya decided he would like to do them as well, but it was also a convenient decision, since he had no studio and miniatures could be done at a table. I once knew a painter who had the use of a huge warehouse where he made canvases that covered the expanse of the walls, stepping back to stare at them in the grey and luminous light that seeped in through the big metal-framed windows. Then he moved to a tiny attic in Paris and worked sitting on the edge of a narrow bed, making the same images as before but now so small that each one could fit into the palm of his hand. So too with Goya, during those early months.

  In the winter of 1824 he bought a number of thin slices of ivory. The smallest were some two inches square, while the biggest, which were more roughly shaped, were closer to three and a half inches. A young man named Antonio de Brugada, who specialised in painting remembered seascapes and who spent as much time as he could in Goya’s company, has left a detailed description of the process by which these miniatures were made. Goya began by darkening the slip of ivory with diluted lamp black and then, like an alchemist performing a magical act of transformation, he let fall a drop of water which spread across the surface and opened up the darkness with random patches of light through which the ivory gleamed, as enticing as hidden naked skin.