Images of Old Age in the Paintings of Ivana Kobilca

This paper explores a wide range of depictions and preparatory studies of elderly figures within the artistic oeuvre of the Slovenian painter Ivana Kobilca (1861–1926). In the middle of the second half of the 19th century, she created a series of physiognomic studies of old people, which confirmed and highlighted her mastery of a realistic pictorial language, which was in many respects determined by the painting principles of Leibl’s Munich circle. In this concentration on psychological expression and realism, her work differs greatly from that of other Slovenian artists of the time, who most often visualised anecdotal genre depictions of the elderly. The paper thus highlights and analyses the exceptional importance of this group of paintings of elderly people that Kobilca created in the 1880s and 1890s.