Self-Portrait at the Age of 83

Frith painted this self-portrait at the age of 83, one year before his death in 1909, making it a remarkable document of artistic longevity and self-scrutiny in extreme old age. Victorian painters who survived into the twentieth century faced the strange experience of outliving the cultural world that had made them famous — the Derby Day sensation of 1858 was already half a century in the past, and the art world Frith knew had been transformed by Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and the aesthetic movements he had publicly resisted. The Yale Centre for British Art's holding places this final self-accounting within an American institution's commitment to the breadth of British art history, including figures who fell from critical favour in their own lifetimes.

Oil on canvas with the simplified, less elaborate finish that characterises Frith's very late work, when the elaborate crowd scenes of his prime had given way to the intimate formats age and changed fashion demanded. The self-portrait genre requires honest confrontation with physical change that a lifetime of portraying others had trained him to observe.