Goya Bewitched
Regular price £29.95'This exhibition, it seems, is the key to the Goya Code, the door to this private artist’s inner world. It reveals exactly why his horrific scenes are so convincing, immediate, and yet inscrutable.' - The Guardian
A reconstruction of Goya's so-called 'Witches and Old Women' album
Ravaged by a debilitating illness and all-but completely deaf, Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) was a changed artist in middle age. While he continued as a court painter to the Spanish crown, he worked privately on eight albums of some 600 brush and ink drawings. The drawings they contained – populated with nightmarish figures, superstitious tales and horrific deaths – were never intended to be seen beyond a small circle of friends.
Published to accompany the Courtauld's 2015 exhibition, this publication brings together, for the first time, all the existing pages from one of those eight albums - the Witches and Old Women album. This album was a long-scattered sketchbook filled with drawings of witchcraft, old age and other obsessions in about 1819-23. The drawings are less about old women than about Goya, as he faces illness and death, and the monsters in his dreams.
Details
- Author: Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Art historian and Curator, Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album
- Paperback: 200 pages
- Date published: February 2015
- Language: English
- ISBN: 978-1907372766
- Product Dimensions: 26 x 21.6 x 1.9 cm
