The Voyage of Life: Old Age

Thomas Cole

Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Art

The Voyage of Life is a celebrated series of four oil paintings by Thomas Cole depicting an allegorical journey along the River of Life through the four stages of human existence—Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age. In Old Age, the voyager reaches the end of his earthly journey: the river opens into a vast, stormy sea under a darkened sky, as the aged figure looks upward toward a celestial light breaking through the clouds, guided at last toward salvation by his guardian angel. Cole, an English-born American painter and founder of the Hudson River School, infused each canvas with Romantic landscape imagery deliberately marshaled as a Christian moral allegory, using season, light, and weather to mirror the spiritual condition of the voyager at each stage of life. The series, first painted in 1840 and reproduced with minor alterations in Rome in 1841–42, became one of the most widely known works of 19th-century American art, resonating powerfully with audiences during the era of religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening.