"I am old. I am old."

Thus spake Falstaff in a moment of rare but anguished self-truth.  I, too, am old, having passed my allotted 'three score years and ten' but fortunately I have maintained my good health and so I don't feel old.  I suppose it has been last weeks jollifications in praise of our Queen putting up with us all for 60 years that has set my mind to the topic of old age.  That in turn instantly takes me back several years to an exhibition in London of Rembrandt's portraits of old men.  I was middle-aged then but I have always remembered the effect those wonderful paintings had on me.  I have found a site with a goodly selection of the great man's paintings and I give you here a few examples starting with a man who could be Falstaff himself:

He doesn't look back at us but seems to be looking back on himself - or perhaps he is just trying to think of the punchline to some rude tale before he takes another swig of ale. 

Here is a study in elderly introspection:

Apparently, the experts have discovered via x-ray techniques that there is another, early portrait underneath.  Again, the subject avoids our gaze and we are free to read into his expression whatever we think he is thinking!  Somehow, to me, there is an air of melancholy about this man.  Is it lost youth, or, lost love, or, more pedestrian, just a lost wager?

Finally, but I do urge you all to go and look at some more, here is a self-portrait.  I remember that there were several of them at the exhibition I visited:

A rather nondescript face, perhaps, but one that gives the appearance of considerable experience of life and living.  Not handsome but he stares back at us steadily, albeit, with a hint of curiosity in that very slight frown.

A better critic than me once wrote that Rembrandt, whose life just over-lapped that of Shakespeare, was the first artist to execute for painting what Shakespeare had done for theatre, and show the inner man.  Just like Shakespeare's characters who "strut their hour upon the stage", Rembrandt's old men are all too human and all too ambiguous.

 Oooops!  I was going to finish there but I couldn't resist this old man:

What a face!  Half-hidden but every line, every crease contains a story of a life lived.

 

Comments

[dearieme]

If only two painters' works were allowed to me they would be Turner and Rembrandt. Dear God, R was good with people (whereas Turner couldn't do people for toffee).

[Whyaxye]

Agreed. Rembrandt's self-portraits are superb. Not a hint of self-consciousness in the usual sense, but a lot of affectionate curiosity about this old body that he had been lugging around for seventy years.

[David Duff]

Right, some time next week we shall have a Turner exhibition all of our own.