Youth and Time

Youth and Time, painted in 1901, addresses the allegorical theme of temporal passage and the transience of beauty through the conventional device of a young woman—representing youth—in the company of or confronted by time's presence. This more conceptually ambitious subject than Godward's typical single-figure studies in leisure gave him the opportunity to create a work with philosophical content beyond the purely sensory pleasures of his archaeological figure painting. The allegorical pairing of youth and time had a long tradition in Western painting that Godward here translated into his Neo-Classical idiom.

The allegorical subject requires Godward to represent time's passage through figural and compositional means rather than through narrative action, a challenge he addresses through the arrangement of the figures and the contrast between their attributes or ages. The precision of his figure and drapery rendering continues to assert itself even in this more conceptually weighted subject.