Posts tagged ‘historical fiction’
“The work of the informed imagination”. Jackie Mallon interviews Fionnuala Brennan
July 25, 2016
BetimesBooksNow
Jackie Mallon: You’ve said you’re fascinated by Goya, and this passion comes through clearly in your novel, The Painter’s Women, but where exactly did your interest originate?
Fionnuala Brennan: I studied Art History at Trinity College Dublin, so I was of course aware of the importance of Goya in European art history. Years after I graduated, I saw an exhibition of his Disasters of War etchings (Los desastres de la guerra) and that is when my fascination grew.
Here was a Court Painter in late 18th and early 19th century Spain who had painted formal portraits of Wellington, as well as of King Charles IV and Queen Maria Luisa on horseback, and yet who saw nothing glorious or triumphant in war, who depicted the cruelty and inhumanity so movingly in these small etchings. To my mind, he is one of the first and certainly one of the most influential anti-war artists. Picasso followed in these footsteps.
I went to the Prado and was struck again by his “Black Paintings”; the ones he made for himself on the walls of his country house, Quinta del Sordo, manifesting his despair of human nature. Before that, he had published his wonderfully satirical Caprichos. I went to the British Museum to see some of the originals. The society artist who mocks the hypocrisy and superstition in Spanish society – what a fascinating and enigmatic character!
JM: Why did you choose the point of view of the women in the painter’s life to reveal his character?
FB: I did not want to write a straight biography, however fictionalised, of Goya. I decided that one can learn more from slanted observation than from full frontal, as it were. And who better to have witnessed Goya’s career than the women closest to him? They can show us how he worked, what personal matters troubled or elated him, and what he thought about some of his patrons.
JM: Following on from the previous question, there seems to be an endless desire for historical novels like yours, which are often called biographical fiction, in which a fictional story is woven around illustrious figures from the past in the worlds of literature or art. I’m thinking of Tracy Chevalier’s 1999 novel The Girl with the Pearl Earring to 2011’s bestselling The Paris Wife by Paula McLain or 2014’s Mrs. Hemingway by Naomi Wood. Why do you think we like to read these types of stories?
FB: I think we enjoy biographical fiction because it is less dense and certainly less restricted than non-fiction biographies. Because it has poetic license to look behind the bald facts. Because it is the work of the informed imagination.
JM: How did you approach the historical research that is so important to your novel? I’m interested in how you strike the balance between fact and fiction: How much of the story is based around actual events and how much is the product of your imagination? Likewise the personalities you’ve given the women.
FB: Of course, I read and consulted widely to be sure of the historical events and of the dates and circumstances of Goya’s artistic output. I was always interested in trying to look as deeply as one could into the enigmatic nature of the man. I was also interested in his techniques, how he painted and etched. His letters to his lifelong friend, Martin Zapater, told me a lot. The actual events of his life, such as his commissions, his role as Court Painter, the dates of his works, his marriage, the names of five of the six women in the novel, his residences, as well as the historical events in Spain at that time are all factual.
Five of the painter’s women existed. Apart from the Duchess of Alba, however, we know very little apart from their names about the other four women. I invented Dolores, the sixth woman, in order to place her as the face of The Naked Maja and also to link Goya’s time with the Duchess of Alba in Andalusia in 1796-1797 with his fictional re-appearance in her life during the period of her illness and death in 1802.
Regarding the personalities of the women… I imagined a great deal, but based some of my characterisation on real life events. In the case of his wife Josefa, five of whose children died in infancy, such events must have greatly distressed her, as indeed they did Goya. The row he had with her brother, his first mentor, must also have been a source of distress. His reputed affairs may have disturbed her, as well as his long absence in Andalusia with the Duchess of Alba.
His mistress Leocadia was reputedly sharp-tongued. I imagined what it must have been like to have lived with a much older, difficult, deaf man and not to be accepted as his wife, nor her daughter Rosario recognised as his. According to the date she left her husband and went to live with Goya, it would certainly seem that the child was most likely his.
The character of his daughter-in-law Gumersinda is a work of my imagination. I looked at Goya’s picture of her and concluded that she was, as we say in Ireland, some piece of work. Greedy, jealous, ambitious for her husband Javier and son Mariano.
JM: The novel opens and closes with the voice of Goya’s alleged illegitimate daughter, Rosario, also a painter although lesser known. Why did you decide to bookend the story with her?
FB: Although Goya seemed to have been a courageous man, unafraid to satirize Spanish society and unflattering of his royal patrons, who mixed with the men of the Enlightenment and who was brought before the Inquisition because of his painting The Naked Maja, he had feet of clay with regard to his second family. He did not seem to have made provision for the welfare of Leocadia or of Rosario after his death, leaving everything, as far as I could ascertain, to his son Javier and grandson Mariano. I wanted to open the book with his final illness and death during which his daughter Rosario and his mistress Leocadia were his constant companions and support and to finish it with the subsequent fate of these two women, especially Rosario. This exemplifies the statement which ends the novel: “This world is a masquerade… Everyone wants to appear what he is not, each deluding the other and not even knowing himself.”
It is not possible to fully know anyone else, as we do not even fully know ourselves. So biographies, whether fictionalised or not, while casting some light on their subjects, still look through a dark or misty glass.
JM: I read somewhere that it can be difficult to put into prose the sensations that art evokes without sounding, on one hand, too precious or, on the other, too textbook. Paintings are meant to be seen to be appreciated, not read about. But your descriptions of the masterpieces he created as a result of knowing these women, or sometimes in spite of knowing them, are engaging. Did you have any concerns about this going in?
FB: This question is a bit more difficult to answer. I believe firmly that ideally paintings are meant to be seen, not read about. However, not everyone can see the paintings in the place for which they were painted, as in churches, or can go to the art galleries where they hang, so the only way they can experience the works is in art books and in the words of art critics. Also, in my novel Goya’s works are described by the women who saw them being made, so that the methods he used and the atmosphere in which he worked show us a good deal about the works themselves.
JM: Are you working on something new at the moment and, if so, can you reveal anything about it?
FB: I have just finished a book of short stories entitled Islanders, and I am writing another novel, not biographical fiction this time. It’s set more or less in the present and is in the first draft stage.
Jackie Mallon is the author of Silk for the Feed Dogs
I have long been fascinated by the charismatic artist Francisco de Goya. The seeds of my fascination with this Spanish painter were sown during my studies in History of Art in Trinity College, Dublin. The firework that sent me into orbit to write the novel, The Painter’s Women: Goya in Light and Shade, was a visit to an exhibition in New York some years ago of The Disasters of War. I was stunned at the depiction, in small intimate etchings, of the savagery of man’s inhumanity to man. No glorious victories, no medalled generals; instead bodies hanging from trees, soldiers castrating a helpless man. Later, I went to the British Library in London and handled prints of the Los Caprichos and visited the Prado to see the Black Paintings.
To my mind, Goya is one of the most enigmatic and influential painters in the history of art. As Court Painter, he was well-in with the Spanish royal family and the nobility, of whom he painted many portraits, yet he lambasted what he saw as the cruelty, superstition and hypocrisy in Spanish society, as we can see in his scathingly satirical series of eighty etchings, Los Caprichos (1799). He saw nothing glorious either in war and depicted it in all its horror and brutality in a series of etchings The Disasters of War (1810-1815) and in his large painting, The Third of May, 1808. Goya painted sunny pastoral scenes, church frescoes, courting couples. The same artist also covered the walls of his country house at Quinto del Sordo with grotesque images of monsters and devils―the famous Black Paintings now in the Prado, Madrid.
So who was this Francisco de Goya? In the novel I wanted to explore behind the scenes, to discover something more of the man and of his work. What better perspective to obtain than that of the women who were closest to him in his life? As they lived with Goya at different stages of his long and turbulent career, they have lot to say about the private character of the great artist as well as being able to tell us the background to some of his most famous art works.

Painting portrait of Leocadia Weiss by Goya
Thus, to get a closer view of Francisco de Goya, I chose to create, to listen to, the voices of six women who knew him very well. Four of the six women whose voices we hear in my novel lived in Spain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They are Josefa, Goya’s wife of forty years, the mother of his six children, of whom only one son, Javier, survived infancy; Leocadia, his much younger mistress who lived with him for the last sixteen years of his life until his death in 1828; Rosario, his unacknowledged young daughter who had ambitions to follow in her father’s artistic footsteps, and Gumersinda, his acerbic, grasping daughter-in law. History tells us very little beyond the names of these four women. I wanted to give them a voice, to bring them out of the shade into the light and in doing so to hopefully illuminate Goya.
The fifth voice in The Painter’s Women is that of the totally fictitious Dolores, a young peasant girl who ends up, in the novel, as one of the most legendary nudes in the history of art. The sixth woman is the famous Duchess of Alba, feisty, flighty and fabulously wealthy. She appears more than any other woman in Goya’s art. There was much juicy gossip and speculation as to the nature of their relationship. This gossip finds a possible source in Goya’s portraits of the Duchess; especially the portrait of 1797 in which the Duchess is painted in the black costume of a maja. She is standing on a sandy shore, her right hand points to an inscription in the sand, Solo Goya. On her fingers are two rings, a diamond ring bearing the name Alba and the other a gold ring inscribed Goya. Maybe there is some truth in the rumours, or maybe not. Very little in Goya’s life was transparent.
I will leave the last word to the artist himself, talking to his daughter Rosario.
“This world is a masquerade: face, clothing, voice ―everything is meant to deceive. Everyone wants to appear what he is not, each deluding the other and not even knowing himself.”
Fionnuala Brennan