Some painters treated old age as a joke, and a London museum once turned one of those jokes down three times. Then the painters grew old themselves. Several of the twelve pictures here were made by artists in their seventies and eighties, looking at their own decline in the mirror.
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A young face gives a painter little to hold on to. The skin is smooth, and the brush slides across it. An old face is full of incidents, from wrinkles and sagging skin to a missing tooth or the veins on a hand, and each one has to be looked at.
Old age also carried a meaning, and that meaning changed with the period. Depending on who held the brush, a lined face could stand for foolishness, for wisdom or for death drawing near. And painters grew old too.
A picture earns its place here if it shows an old face or an old body without softening it, or if the painter turns that look on his or her own aging. Only paintings count, and they run from the least known to the most famous.
12. Quinten Massys, An Old Woman ('The Ugly Duchess') (about 1513)
In her raised hand, an old woman holds out a rosebud, a flower with sexual connotations. She leans on a marble parapet in a bodice cut low and laced tight over a wrinkled chest. Above her face rises a horned headdress shaped like a heart, with a white veil and a large jeweled brooch. Her nose is short and turned up, a hairy mole marks her pimpled skin, and her mouth looks toothless. Quinten Massys painted her about 1513.
In 1513, nobody would have taken her for a real lady of fashion. Her clothes were already decades out of date, and the horned headdress had become a visual shorthand for female vanity. She is most likely a fictional figure from the world of carnival, and Massys was among the first painters to make this kind of secular satire.
The rosebud carries the rest of the joke. It is meant for a man Massys painted on a separate panel, An Old Man, now in a private collection in New York. The two old people court each other as if they were still young, and viewers were invited to laugh at them.
Four centuries later, her face no longer made anyone laugh. Hugh Blaker, who owned the panel, offered it to the National Gallery in London on loan in September 1920 and again in February 1922. The director and the trustees were unsettled by her face, treated the picture as a curiosity and declined both times.
After Blaker's death, his sister offered it once more in 1938, and the answer did not change. The gallery only took the panel in 1947, as her bequest in his memory.
Blaker had never shared their unease. In 1921 he had written that his Duchess "rejoices in the title of the ugliest portrait in the world," and he closed with the words "I simply love her."
At a Glance
Artist: Quinten Massys (1465 or 1466 to 1530)
Painted: About 1513
Medium: Oil on oak panel
Size: 62.4 × 45.5 cm (24.6 × 17.9 in)
Where to see it: National Gallery, London
11. Domenico Ghirlandaio, An Old Man and His Grandson (about 1490)
A swollen, bumpy nose sits in the middle of the panel. It belongs to an old man who holds a young boy dressed in red, and the boy is staring right at it. About 1490, the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio could have softened that nose or turned the head away to hide it. He placed it at the very center of the picture instead, exactly where the child's eyes fall.