A great painter’s likeness perfectly caught

Robert Hughes has suffered no shortage of appalling things over the past five years. He has experienced deep depression and a second divorce; he suffered atrocious injuries in a car crash which came within inches of killing him, and has had to undergo 12 operations to piece his body back together again; a feeble attempt was made to blackmail him; he was tried for reckless driving; a scathing attack on his character was conducted in the Australian media on account of his perceived arrogance; he became an unwelcome figure of contempt in his own country, and his estranged only son committed suicide.

From an outside perspective, all this has been dramatic and newsworthy, to be sure. But from the point of view of his admirers one of the most regrettable things to have happened to Robert Hughes is that the story of his struggle with these misfortunes (in most Australian tellings, the sickening secretion of something as close to pure Schadenfreude as you could find anywhere) has threatened to overwhelm the far more edifying story of Hughes’s life as a writer.

To all this his latest book, a life of Goya, is a wonderful retort. A 400-page narrative both balanced and nuanced, it is also as vigorously animated by its subject as anything Hughes has written. As an accessible study of Goya’s life and work, the book is all you could ask for and more. Sturdy in its organisation, its interpretations, its common sense, it nevertheless fizzes with insights and hops with enthusiasm. There is not a dull sentence — as you would perhaps expect; but neither is there anything damaging, as can sometimes be said of Hughes, in the way of self-admiring rhetoric or over-rehearsed polemic. The book sticks to its brief, largely because it has no need to do otherwise: Hughes has found his ideal subject.