The Voyage of Life, Old Age

The old man in the boat has his hands clasped and his eyes fixed on a distant light breaking through the clouds. His guardian angel, absent for most of his journey, has returned and hovers at his side, gesturing upward toward another figure descending through the gap in the sky. His vessel is battered now. The hourglass that once decorated its prow has broken away, and the river that carried him has widened into open ocean with no shore in sight.

This is the fourth and final painting in Thomas Cole's series The Voyage of Life, which follows a single soul from infancy through youth, adulthood, and old age. Cole, the English-born painter who founded the Hudson River School, completed the first set in 1840 for a New York banker named Samuel Ward, who died before he could see them finished. After a disagreement with Ward's family over exhibiting the pictures, Cole simply painted the whole series again while living in Rome in 1842. The allegory was blunt and deliberately so, and nineteenth-century American audiences loved it. Engravings of the four scenes ended up on parlor walls across the country. The one honest surprise here is the color: the heavy browns and bruised clouds make the small patch of light feel genuinely hard won rather than handed over.