074

  • The Voyage of Life—Old Age

  • ca. 1850
  • After Thomas Cole (American 1801-1848) by James Smillie (Scottish American 1807-1885)
  • Hand-colored engraving
  • 38.3 x 57.8 cm., 15-1/16 x 22-3/4" image
  • Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts Purchase through Gift of the Reynold Emanuel and Johnnie Gause Leak Holmén Endowment Fund for the Visual Arts, Paul A. Anderson Art History Collection, Augustana College 1998.13

Essay by Marsha Y. Smith, Professor of Sociology

The fourth and final painting in the series The Voyage of Life—Old Age, commissioned for Samuel Ward in 1839 (Kasson 42-56), reflects the conflicting motifs of life and aging that were present during the mid-nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, attitudes toward aging tended towards gerentophilia, or the valuing of old age. Those few who survived to old age were considered wise men and women. As late as the early 18th century, most wealth and power was still held in the hands of the elders. But industrialization, migration, and capitalism let to declining power among seniors, just as more and more people were living longer (T. R. Cole 55-56). Ironically, as life expectancy rose from approximately 40 years of age at midcentury to the current age of 80 (United States Bureau of the Census, 45), gerontophobia, the fear of old age, emerged and today dominates. Simultaneously, attitudes shifted from aging as something ordered by the Divine to something mortals, or at least science and medicine, could control. Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem "The Deacon's Masterpiece or The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay" first published in 1858, highlights this shift.

Cole's painting contains elements of both gerontophilic and gerontophobic views. The old man no longer guides his boat, now damaged and missing the hourglass so prominent in the three earlier canvases. He does not control the direction of the craft. He sits in the boat, rather than stands. He is stooped, diminished, and frail; clearly at the end of life. But his face is hopeful and alert as he gazes upward. There is no sign of senescence in his eyes. In fact, he does have control of his future. He lifts his countenance and hands to the bright, immortal, heavenly skies. He now is able to see his guardian angel, and is intent on leaving behind the stark, grim, barren landscape of old age. Cole himself wrote about this in his poem about the series. His "voyager, an ancient man, withered and blighted by the frosts of time.knew 'his Angel'; ne'er before discerned.And he soars-away-away!" (T. Cole).