File:Print, satirical print (BM 1862,0517.190).jpg

Height: 395 millimetres

Width: 329 millimetres

(Text from Antony Griffiths, 'The Print in Stuart Britain', BM 1998, cat. 92.) See also Sheila O'Connell, 'The Popular Print in England', BM 1999, cat. 8.4, p. 185. The type of this composition is found throughout western printmaking from the fifteenth century to modern times. Literally hundreds of variations survive, for which see 'Die Lebenstreppe, Bilder der menschlichen Lebensalter', Städtischen Museum, Kleves, 1983. We have been unable to locate the Continental original from which this print was undoubtedly copied.

    The progression is in two dimensions, left to right and bottom to top. Each of the eleven steps marks a decade. From the baby to the fifty year-old life is a constant ascent; thereafter it is a descent to death. To each decade corresponds an animal, and the meaning is explained by the couplet put alongside. So the seventy year-old is like a dog: 'News hee affects to hear and tell, But dogglike loves at home to dwell'. This much is standard. Less usual are the three Fates of classical mythology who spin under the arch; it is more usual to find Death in this position. Above them is the moral 'Watch therefore for yee know not what houre ye Lord doth come'.
    The print was 'sould by Tho: Jenner at the royall Exchange', and there is no sign that this address replaces an earlier one. It appears in his catalogue of 1662. The men are all dressed in the latest French fashion, and the costume suggests a date in the 1630s.
    Other prints of this subject were made in England at the time. Samuel Pepys' collection at Magdalene College, Cambridge, contains a woodcut, 'The historie of the life of man', published in Blackfriars in 1616 (2973, no.443). Walton's 1655 catalogue lists an engraving 'One of once a man and twice a child, or the severall ages of men and women, shewing their rising and falling, both of high and low, rich and poor, from the cradle to the grave'.