The Late Style: How Five Old Masters Closed Their Careers

The German critical theorist Theodor Adorno coined the phrase Spätstil — "late style" — in a 1937 essay on Beethoven's last string quartets, the works the composer wrote in the five years before his death in 1827, when (Adorno argued) he had stopped trying to reconcile the formal expectations of the genre with the demands of his own thought and instead let the contradictions stand. "The maturity of the late works of significant artists," Adorno wrote, "does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation." The idea has been borrowed for painters ever since: the late works of Rembrandt, of Titian, of Goya, of Hokusai, of Cézanne, of Monet, of Picasso are all, in their different ways, ravaged — looser, stranger, less polite, less concerned with the rules they had spent half a century mastering. This essay reads the late style of five painters working in old age. Each of them lived past sixty. Several of them lived into their eighties. All of them changed in their last decade in ways that have shaped how every modern artist thinks about ending a career.

Claude Monet, one of the Grandes Décorations water-lily panels installed at the Orangerie in Paris, painted in the studio at Giverny between 1914 and 1926. Oil on canvas, each panel approximately 200 × 600 cm. Monet was in his mid-seventies when he began the Orangerie cycle and in his mid-eighties when he completed it; the panels were installed in two purpose-built oval rooms in the Tuileries in May 1927, a few months after his death. The late water lilies are the canonical end-point of Monet's career — looser, more abstract, less concerned with the impressionist fidelity to the optical surface he had spent fifty years refining.

Rembrandt, 1669: the year of the last self-portrait

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn died in Amsterdam in October 1669 at the age of sixty-three. The last year of his life produced at least three self-portraits, all of them painted in the small attic studio of the rented house on the Rozengracht where he had been living since 1658 after his bankruptcy four years earlier had forced the sale of the larger house on the Jodenbreestraat that had been his home and workshop for two decades. The self-portrait now most often dated to 1669 itself — the painting in a London collection — shows him in three-quarter view, his hands folded in front of him, wearing a plain dark fur-trimmed cap, his face directly lit from the upper left and modelled in the late thick impasto that had become his signature. The face is asymmetric. The right eye sits slightly lower than the left. The lower lip is heavier than the upper. The skin of the cheeks is broken into small visible flecks of red, pink, and yellow ochre, applied with a palette knife and the butt-end of a brush as much as with normal bristle strokes.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, 1669. Oil on canvas, 86 × 70.5 cm. One of three self-portraits Rembrandt painted in the last year of his life. The face is asymmetric — the right eye sits slightly lower than the left, the lower lip is heavier than the upper — and the skin is modelled in thick visible impasto applied with a palette knife and the butt-end of a brush as much as with normal bristle strokes. The painting was made in the small attic studio of the rented house on the Rozengracht where Rembrandt lived after his 1656 bankruptcy.

Rembrandt had painted himself at least seventy-five times across his career — more often than any major painter before him and more often than any major painter since. The early self-portraits, from the late 1620s in Leiden, are an actor's portfolio: Rembrandt as Oriental king, as gold-chained captain, as laughing soldier, as melancholy poet. The middle self-portraits, from the prosperous decade of the 1640s in Amsterdam, are documentary: Rembrandt the successful court portraitist, in his best clothes, looking out at the buyer. The late self-portraits, from the 1660s, are something else entirely. They are not roles. They are not advertisements. They are a man in his sixties looking at himself in a small studio mirror at the end of every working day and trying to put down what he saw, in paint, on canvas, without the consoling lies. The 1669 painting is the last of these. Rembrandt died approximately six months after he finished it.

Goya, 1815-23: the painter inside the bell

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes was a year younger than Rembrandt had been at his death, when he painted the small self-portrait now most often dated to 1815 — Goya was sixty-nine years old, partly deaf since the catastrophic illness of 1793-94 that had ended his promising court career, and three years past the moment in 1812 when his wife Josefa Bayeu had died and his son Javier had taken over the management of the family. Goya had been the leading portraitist of the Madrid court for thirty years; he had painted the royal family, the entire grandee aristocracy, the actors and bullfighters and intellectuals of Madrid, and (between 1808 and 1814) the consequences of the Peninsular War against Napoleon's occupying army in two of the most uncompromising history paintings ever made, The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808. The 1815 self-portrait shows him in a darkened interior, his collar loose, his hair grey, his face turned slightly to the right. The painting is smaller than Rembrandt's late self-portraits — twenty centimetres on a side — and the brushwork is rougher.

Francisco de Goya, Self-Portrait, 1815. Oil on panel, 51 × 46 cm. The painter at sixty-nine, two years before he would begin the etchings of the Disparates, six years before he would paint the Black Paintings on the plaster walls of the Quinta del Sordo. The collar is loose, the hair is grey, the face is turned slightly to the right. The painting is rougher than the formal court portraits of the previous thirty years — less polished surface, less attention to the costume, more attention to the eyes and the mouth — and it belongs to a small group of self-portraits Goya made in the period between his wife Josefa's death (1812) and the move into the Quinta del Sordo (1819).

The four years that followed produced two of Goya's three greatest late projects. In 1816 he published the eighty etchings of the La Tauromaquia series on the history of bullfighting in Spain; in 1819-23, on the walls of the house called the Quinta del Sordo ("The House of the Deaf Man") on the outskirts of Madrid that he had bought in February 1819, he painted directly onto the plaster walls of the dining room and the salon the fourteen images known to art history as the Pinturas negras — the Black Paintings. They were not commissioned by anyone. They were not seen, while Goya was alive, by anyone outside his immediate household. They were not given titles by Goya — the conventional titles (Saturn Devouring His Son, Witches' Sabbath, The Dog) were invented in the 1860s by the curator who organised the first cataloguing of the paintings after they had been removed from the plaster walls and transferred to canvas. The Black Paintings are the late Goya in its rawest form — old age, partial deafness, the personal wreckage of the Peninsular War, the loss of his wife and most of his old patrons, the political collapse of the liberal Spanish Constitution of 1812, all condensed into fourteen images of unrelieved darkness.

Hokusai, 1820-49: the old man mad about painting

Katsushika Hokusai lived to be eighty-eight years old, dying in Edo (modern Tokyo) in April 1849. The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji — the series that includes the Great Wave off Kanagawa, which we read in full here — was started when he was sixty-nine and published between 1830 and 1832. The Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, a different and longer project (three printed volumes, more than a hundred and one images each in line and tone), was published between 1834 and 1835 when he was in his middle seventies. The fifteen volumes of the Hokusai Manga — sketchbooks of "random drawings," thousands of small studies of everyday Edo life, animals, plants, mythological creatures, mountain landscapes, and instructional how-to-draw demonstrations — were published between 1814 (when Hokusai was fifty-four) and 1849 (the year of his death, the final volume issued posthumously by his publisher).

Katsushika Hokusai, page from Hokusai Manga (Random Sketches), Volume 4, 1816. Woodblock-printed book, approximately 23 × 16 cm per page. The fourth of the fifteen volumes of sketchbooks Hokusai published across the second half of his career; the project began when he was fifty-four and continued until his death at eighty-eight in 1849. The Manga volumes are not what "manga" means in modern Japanese (that meaning is unrelated). They are sketchbooks of small drawings of everyday Edo life — fishermen, sumo wrestlers, ghosts, plants, mountain views, drawing demonstrations — circulating widely in Edo and the Japanese provinces and (after 1853) abroad in Europe.

In a famous postscript to the Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai (then seventy-five) wrote one of the most-quoted paragraphs in art history. "From the age of six," he begins, "I had a passion for drawing the form of things. By the age of fifty I had published an infinite number of drawings, but all I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. Consequently, when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress; at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at one hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvellous stage; and when I am one hundred and ten, everything I do, the smallest dot, will be alive." He signs the postscript Gakyō Rōjin Manji — "the old man mad about painting." He died at eighty-eight, reportedly saying he wished for ten more years, even five, to become a real painter. The position is the inverse of Rembrandt's. Rembrandt looked back at himself in a mirror at the end of every working day. Hokusai looked forward, in a postscript to a printed book, at a hundred and ten.

Cézanne, 1902-06: the mountain dissolved

Paul Cézanne died in Aix-en-Provence in October 1906 at the age of sixty-seven, four days after walking back to town in a thunderstorm from a painting session on the road to the village of Le Tholonet east of the city, where he had been working on yet another view of Mont Sainte-Victoire. He had been painting the mountain for nearly thirty years. The early views — from the 1880s, when he started the project — are recognisable landscape; the mountain sits at the centre of the canvas, framed by foreground trees and the pale limestone roads, and the brushwork is methodical, painting the form of each rock and tree. The middle views — from the 1890s, painted from the quarries at Bibémus on the eastern slope of the mountain — are tighter, more architectural, the rocks and trees broken into the angular constructive strokes for which Cézanne would later be remembered as the founding father of Cubism. The late views — from the last four years of Cézanne's life, 1902 to 1906, painted from the studio he had built on the lane called Les Lauves on the north side of Aix — are something else. The mountain is still there, recognisable, in the centre or at the right of the canvas; but the brushwork has become looser, the constructive strokes are now larger and more transparent, the picture surface has begun to dissolve into pure colour patches that overlap and recede.

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Les Lauves, c. 1904-06. Oil on canvas, dimensions vary. One of the late series of views of the mountain painted from the studio on the lane called Les Lauves on the north side of Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne worked in the last four years of his life. The brushwork has become looser than in the constructive Bibémus series of the 1890s; the mountain is still recognisable at the centre but the foreground rocks and trees have dissolved into overlapping patches of pure colour. The painting is the canonical example of Cézanne's late style and the immediate precedent for the Picasso–Braque experiments that became Cubism three years after Cézanne's death.

Cézanne had been a virtually unknown painter for most of his career. His first solo exhibition, with the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard, was in November 1895, when Cézanne was already fifty-six. By 1900 he was acknowledged among the younger generation of French painters (Émile Bernard, Maurice Denis, the Nabis group around Bonnard and Vuillard) as a significant figure; by 1903 a small group of dealers had begun to acquire his work for inventory; by the year of his death in 1906 the prices for the new late paintings were rising. The two Mont Sainte-Victoire canvases from 1904-06 in the present collections of museums in Philadelphia, Zürich, Basel, and New York are now considered, by collective art-historical consensus, among the most consequential paintings of the early twentieth century. Picasso and Braque saw them at the 1907 Cézanne retrospective in Paris (the year after the painter's death) and went home that night and began the experiments that would become Cubism within eighteen months.

Monet, 1914-26: the water lilies as an environment

Claude Monet survived all four of the previous painters in this essay. He was born in 1840 (six years before Goya's death, three years before Hokusai's), and he died in December 1926 at the age of eighty-six in the house at Giverny that he had bought in 1890 and turned, across the next thirty-five years, into one of the most photographed gardens in Europe. The garden at Giverny — the famous water-lily pond crossed by a Japanese arched bridge in green-painted wood, surrounded by willows and irises and bamboo — is itself a late-style project: Monet bought the marshy field below the existing kitchen garden in 1893, dug the pond, dammed it with a sluice from the small Ru stream, planted the water lilies (a relatively new hybrid imported from the Latour-Marliac nursery in 1889), and from about 1899 onward made the pond and the bridge the almost exclusive subjects of his painting for the last twenty-seven years of his life.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies (one of the late horizontal canvases preparing the Orangerie cycle), c. 1914-22. Oil on canvas, large format. The late water lilies remove the conventional landscape devices that had organised Monet's earlier work — horizon line, bank of the pond, framing trees — and present only the surface of the water itself with the lily-pads floating on top and the reflections of sky and willows from above. Monet was in his mid-seventies when he began the Orangerie series and in his mid-eighties when he completed it. He developed bilateral cataracts in the 1910s; the second cataract was operated on in 1923; the colour-range of the paintings of those years was affected and Monet repainted several canvases after his sight partially recovered.

The Grandes Décorations — the eight enormous water-lily panels installed at the Orangerie of the Tuileries in Paris in 1927 — were begun in 1914, the same year Monet's son Jean died and the same year the First World War broke out. Monet was seventy-four. The panels were promised, in a public letter of November 1918 to the Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (a close personal friend, the man who would attend Monet's funeral in 1926), as a gift to the French Republic to commemorate the Armistice. They took twelve more years to complete. Monet developed bilateral cataracts in the 1910s; the second cataract was operated on in 1923; for several years in the early 1920s his colour-range was affected, with the canvases of those years tending to a reddish-brown overall tonality that Monet repainted, partially, after his sight recovered in 1924. The Orangerie installation opened five months after his death in May 1927. The late water lilies are the canonical end-point of Monet's career — looser, larger, more abstract, less concerned with the impressionist fidelity to the optical surface he had spent fifty years refining.

Key takeaways

• Theodor Adorno's 1937 essay on Beethoven's last quartets coined the term Spätstil — late style — for the works a great artist makes in the last decade of life when the rules they had spent half a century mastering begin to dissolve. The idea has been borrowed for painters: Rembrandt, Goya, Hokusai, Cézanne, Monet, and Titian, Picasso, and Matisse after them all worked in old age in ways that have shaped how every modern artist thinks about ending a career.

• Rembrandt died at sixty-three in October 1669 having painted himself at least seventy-five times across his career. The 1669 self-portrait — painted approximately six months before his death — is asymmetric, modelled in thick impasto applied with a palette knife as much as a brush, and shows the painter looking at himself in a small studio mirror without the consoling lies. The late self-portraits are something other than roles or advertisements; they are documentary.

• Goya painted himself at sixty-nine in 1815, three years past his wife Josefa's death, partly deaf, the head of the Spanish royal portraitists who had survived the Peninsular War. Between 1819 and 1823 he painted the fourteen Black Paintings directly onto the plaster walls of his house outside Madrid — the Quinta del Sordo — without commission and without intention to exhibit. The late Goya is the rawest old-age painting in the European canon.

• Hokusai lived to be eighty-eight. His most famous projects — Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830-32), Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (1834-35), and the fifteen volumes of Hokusai Manga (1814-1849) — were all begun after he was sixty-nine. His famous postscript to the Hundred Views ("At seventy-three I have learned a little; at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at one hundred and ten everything I do, the smallest dot, will be alive") is the inverse of Rembrandt's stance: forward not back, ambition not closure.

• Cézanne died at sixty-seven in October 1906, four days after walking back to Aix in a thunderstorm from a painting session on the road to Le Tholonet. The Mont Sainte-Victoire canvases from his last four years (1902-06), painted from the studio on the lane called Les Lauves, dissolve the foreground rocks and trees into overlapping colour patches and were the immediate precedent for the Picasso-Braque experiments that became Cubism in 1908.

• Monet survived all four of the others. He died at eighty-six in 1926 in the house at Giverny he had bought in 1890. The Grandes Décorations — the eight large water-lily panels installed at the Orangerie of the Tuileries five months after his death — were begun in 1914 (Monet aged 74) and completed twelve years later despite two cataract operations that affected his colour-range in the early 1920s. The Orangerie cycle is the canonical end-point of Monet's career.

• Adorno's claim that late style is "not round but furrowed, even ravaged" describes all five painters above. None of them softened in old age; all of them dropped the formal expectations they had spent fifty years mastering; all of them produced, in the last decade of life, work that has been disproportionately influential on the painters who came after them.

Browse late-period prints by Rembrandt, Goya, Hokusai, Cézanne, and Monet in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.