Mirroring Age and Aging in Pissarro's Late Self-Portraits

This paper aims to explore old age as representing a pictorial language defined by interior and exterior relations, through Camille Pissarro’s self-portraits as an aged man. Towards the age of seventy, Pissarro was forced to give up working en plein air due to a chronic eye infection. Two of his three self-portraits from this period, which were made using a mirror, depict the artist in an interior space, while his gaze is directed to the mirror. That mirror is reflected in turn behind the painter, in the form of a window, from which an urban landscape is seen. My discussion will analogize between the mirror and the window, which represent interiority and exteriority respectively, arguing that they enable us to construe these paintings as perceptions of old age. Today, Aging Studies reflect old age using two approaches that do not always meet: as a personal, biological and psychological process, but also as a social construct that the elder person adopts. I will suggest that for Pissarro, the pictorial space of an interior with a window and an imagined mirror provided his articulation of aging as an interior experience reflected by the mirror, and at the same time as a construct, an exterior view in the form of landscape painting. Ultimately, I will argue that the self-portrait which depicts Pissarro painting serves as a manifestation of reconsolidation of the two approaches, where the artist accepts his condition by depicting himself as others see him: an old painter.