How you can use this image

This image can be used for non-commercial research or private study purposes, and other UK exceptions to copyright permitted to users based in the United Kingdom under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, as amended and revised. Any other type of use will need to be cleared with the rights holder(s).

Review the copyright credit lines that are located underneath the image, as these indicate who manages the copyright (©) within the artwork, and the photographic rights within the image.

The collection that owns the artwork may have more information on their own website about permitted uses and image licensing options.

Review our guidance pages which explain how you can reuse images, how to credit an image and how to find images in the public domain or with a Creative Commons licence available.

Buy a print or image licence

You can purchase this reproduction

If you have any products in your basket we recommend that you complete your purchase from Art UK before you leave our site to avoid losing your purchases.

Order a print

Notes

Add or edit a note on this artwork that only you can see. You can find notes again by going to the ‘Notes’ section of your account.

This is the fourth and final painting in Lancret’s series of 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 a thick beard strokes a 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. 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.