Head of a Cello Player
Petrus van der Velden (1837-1913)
Watercolour and oil wash on paper
696 x 577mm
Bequeathed by Mr C.Y. Fell in 1918

From as early as the ancient Greek myth of the eternally youthful Eros, beauty has been the domain of the young.  This concept is explained by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) in his Twilight of Idols of 1895:

“When it comes to beauty, man posits himself as the norm of perfection [and] he worships himself in these … Ugliness is seen as a sign and symptom of degeneration … Every suggestion of exhaustion, heaviness, senility, fatigue, any sort of lack of freedom, like convulsions or paralysis, especially the smell, the colour, the form of dissolution, of decomposition … all this provokes an identical reaction, the value judgement ‘ugly’ … What does man hate?  There is no doubt about this: he hates the twilight of his own type.”

Ask any artist though and they will negate this wholesale definition of age.  This lines and character of the elderly sitter are highly desired by the artist.  The young sitter is yet to accumulate a history and is instead admired for innocence and imperfection.  The aged sitter is an intellectual challenge for the artist; trying to capture their personality and soul makes different demands of the artist and sets the work on a conceptual level that distinguishes portraiture from other forms of art.