Hoofd van een oude man met bril 1778 - 1838

Anthonie van den Bos created this head of an old man with a pair of glasses with etching, around the late 18th or early 19th century. This sort of character study was popular in the Netherlands and wider Europe at the time, reflecting a growing interest in the individual and the everyday. The etching technique itself allowed for a democratization of image production, making art more accessible beyond the elite. Consider the implications of the man's spectacles. Who had access to these kinds of technologies? What would they have been used for? We can think about the etching not simply as a portrait, but as a document of social and intellectual life during the Enlightenment. It is a visual representation of the changing relationship between knowledge, technology, and aging. To understand its full context, we might research Dutch printmaking traditions of the time, or the social history of eyeglasses and their wearers. Art, like history, is always contingent on context.