The Four Ages of Man: Old Age

This is the fourth and final painting in Lancret’s series The Four Ages of Man, entitled Old Age (La Vieillesse).Lancret dispensed with the usual depiction of old people warming themselves indoors before an open fire to take the scene outdoors. A young woman rejects an old man’s advances while an old woman spins and another sleeps. A seated man with white hair and thick beard strokes his dog while another man watches the antics of their companion with the young girl. A work by or after the Le Nain brothers may have inspired Lancret’s depiction of Old Age. Louis Le Nain’s Peasant Interior of about 1645 (National Gallery of Art, Washington) depicts a similar-looking elderly man with white hair and beard seated beside an elderly woman holding a distaff. The figures in Lancret’s Old Age are seated in the courtyard of a rustic cottage and of much more modest means and dress than those in the earlier paintings in the series.Lancret was assiduous in having his compositions copied by leading engravers. The Seasons, The Four Ages of Man, The Four Times of Day and The Elements were all engraved so he could make as much money as possible from them in printed as well as painted form.The series of The Four Ages of Man was engraved in reverse by Nicolas de Larmessin III and announced in the July 1735 issue of the Mercure de France. The verse on the engraving roughly translates as: ‘Old people you are defeated by time that devours you / although you retain your eyes and desires / do you lack these gifts? / To live again / You are quite shamed by turbulent pleasures.’ Most of the numerous painted copies are also in reverse, showing they were copied from the prints. A set of large wall tapestries based on Larmessin’s prints was made at the Aubusson tapestry works around 1745–50.