Think back to any of a number of old films, from early Three Stooges shorts to Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (where a long-white-bearded Walter Huston does his famous dance); add to that the stereotypical image the Old Year seen in NYE decorations, old guys as depicted in numerous Westerns, etc.
As it happens, I noticed that as I get older, I have to be a little more carefully when shaving myself, at least on certain parts of my face. Or that could be for some other reason that I don’t really know about. Either way, I can’t see myself giving up shaving in the foreseeable future. But what all this makes me wonder about is this: In the old days, did a lot of aging men tend to give up shaving, either because shaving was more difficult in the days of straight razors?
Or did this come more from the fact that many young men wore full beards in Victorian times, and a lot of them would have simply decided to continue doing so as they reached an advanced age in the early 20th Century?
One Factual Answer is that for men growing a beard is a cultural or fashionable choice, but growing a nice white beard, while not requiring extremely advanced age, is going to be easier after age 70 (let’s say).
Certainly a long white beard was associated with wise old men from the sages of Ancient Greece onwards — they didn’t have reliable hair dyes in the olden days — not to mention the Norse pantheon; but your mention of the Victorians brought to mind Julia Margaret Cameron, who photographed mid-Victorian worthies. Her Wiki has a couple, including her husband, and one of her most famous images was of the unbelievably young looking Ellen Terry, who married briefly George Frederick Watts, 30 years her senior, who sported a natty white beard. **
Julia Margaret Cameron beards** on Google instantly shows a number of wonderfully odd white beards, some of which were beyond imagination let alone understanding.
Apart from your reasons, young men in Victorian times may simply have been returning to that which they grew up with as age caught them up.
I doubt if straight razors were inefficient ( unlike the heated walnut shells of the Ancients ) although they required a good deal of stropping, if that task wasn’t handed to one’s manservant; keeping such beards would have been a lot more work.
Since before He was called God. If we go to polytheistic religions, the long white beard was a standard attribute for Father-Gods throughout at least Europe (I’m even less familiar with art from other areas).
I think this falls smack into Cal Meacham’s area of expertise, I’ll give him a ping.
In the early 20th century, the old men were fellows who had been adults in the 1860s. This was an era in which facial hair was quite fashionable. (You’ve seen Civil War photos, yes?) Old men are not known for their tendency to adopt the fashions popular among the young; they tend to continue the styles they embraces when they themselves were younger.
By the mid-20th century, the depictions of old men often included tattoos. Young people didn’t have them as a general rule. Eventually that generation of old men died off and time went by and tattoos weren’t associated with old men any more and they came back on the scene as a young-person thing (for both sexes this time).
Thanks for the Vote of Confidence, but I haven’t made a special study of this.
I think the image **Spectre/B] is looking for is the “Ancient of Days” image, often associated with God the Father in artwork, like this one by William Blake:
Or the guy in the Glass Coffin on the right here:
Or God as depicted in the 13th century:
You might almost add Santa Claus to the list, but I think of longer, straighter white beards when I think of the trope
(Incidentally, I wouldn’t include Walter Huston in Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the list – his beard is downright short:
As, of course, do a lot of Biblical Patriarchs in Renaissance and later artwork.
Zeus has a beard, of course, but it’s more Walter Huston-ish in the Greek and Roman art I’ve seen. In fact, I can’t recall a really long beard in Graeco-Roman art.
One of the Taoist Eight Immortals, Zhang Guolao (The “-lao” means “the old”) is depicted with a long and flowing beard:
Noah almost always gets a beard, but not always the long type.
Huge full beards were a feature of Babylonian art:
Ancient Egyptian art often features long beards, but they’re stiff and formal and wrapped up and, pretty often, false:
I’ve read that one reason for false beards (in Egypt and Mesopotamia) was that they shaved off the real ones to defeat lice and other vermin. It’s possible, but I wouldn’t assert it without looking into it more. Some people say it was just to imitate the Gods. In any event, Egyptian beards aren’t always of the iconic length.
To sum up : from what I recall and from this quick survey, you have some impressive beards in Mesopotamia and Egypt, but not ancient Greece or Rome. Whether such long beards were a feature of everyday life or an indication by art, I don’t recall seeing any in either East or WEst until, say, the 10th century (even when depicting characters much older, like the Biblical patriarchs), but it became a pretty standard image after that for Old and Respected people.
The Wikipedia article on Beards ( Beard - Wikipedia ) indicates that Confucius held that beards ought not to be cut. The logical extrapolation is that Confucius ought to be depicted with a long beard. And his is, in much later Eastern and Western art. But I note that the early art shows both him and Lao Tse (founder of Taoism, also usually depicted in later art with a long beard) with pretty small beards, not the long flowing type.:
I would agree with many of the points you made. The fashion of the time in the middle of the 1800 was for beards, as these men aged, they retained their preferred fashion.
Another point that you have observed for yourself is the difficulty in effective shaving as one gets older. I observed that my own grandfather, later in life, required someone else to shave him, as his eyesight and fine motor skills had both deteriorated. For some men in those circumstances, not shaving is just an easier option. It’s easier to neaten up a beard than to shave. This is true of modern shaving tools, not just the traditional straight razor.
I agree. Growing beards was a popular 19th century fashion. So in the 20th century, it became associated with older men.
The big change was probably Gillette patenting a new type of cheap razor in 1901. Gillette was an astute businessman and heavily marketed the idea that men should be clean shaven (ie buy his product).
As **Cal **says, this trope goes back to ancient times. I doubt Gillete or 1850s fashion have had much impact on it.
Here’s another factor no one has mentioned. …
Many of the tropes of old wise men also have long flowing head hair, albeit with a receding hairline or full bore male pattern baldness. For example, see Santa and many depictions of the christian god.
Which to me says it’s more a matter of “I’m out of hock to the System. I don’t have to groom myself for social acceptability, so I won’t.” Rather than someone seeking a fashion, they’re rejecting fashion and letting nature take its course.
Which for men tends to be a longish hair & beard whose length is limited by how sturdy their hair is, not by how often they bump into scissors.
When I was last out of hock to the system & let my beard grow untamed, it stopped being bushy at about nipple height & the last of it trailed down to halfway between nipple & navel. On a 20-something guy that only took a couple years to grow to its natural limit. For an elderly man that might be the work of a decade or more. But they have plenty of time.
Beards came back from their long hiatus around the Crimean War, and mayhap a decade before paving the way; up to 1670, beards aplenty, then virtually none during the 18th century ( minus a few eccentric peers *, and some aristocrats’ pet hermits who lived in picturesque mock ruins etc. etc. ) and very few up to the 1830s.
The Army establishment fought like blazes to prevent soldiers resuming beards ( and sailors too up to the 1870s ) because they were always very very thick, but it was pointed out that a few beards would in no way make the Crimea that much worse, being a massive hellhole. It is interesting to note that Napoleon’s upper officers, mainly from the richer strata if non-aristocratic generally looked like dark, curly-haired clean-shaven latin clones with ‘strong’ features: how surprising to their survivors to watch their sons and grandsons buzz off under another Napoleon Crimea-Ho with exuberant whiskers…
Not typical of these was Lord Gearge Gordon the lunatic rabble-rouser, he grew a beard in decline, mainly I feel because he converted to Judaism; another lunatic was George III who had a very respectable length, since in his sad and lonely last decades he threatened to have the battle-axes used on those who would shave him, dreary little conformists as they were. Quite right too.
Other Jews were Fagin, more of a scraggly affair, and one of my favourites as a child: Israel Zangwill’s King of Schnorrers.
But the modern US stereotype isn’t of a respected bearded wise old man giving out sage advice. It is the crotchety bearded old man shaking his walking stick.
I think this is a US thing associating bearded old man with unsophisticated yokels. e.g. the Hatfeilds and Mccoys:
One odd speculation that I read in an article about something else entirely - if you’re very old, and you lose all your teeth, a beard will somewhat mask the caved-in look that tooth loss gives your face. The article went on to speculate that this made very old women scarier looking than very old men.
I could possibly see this making it slightly more likely that younger relatives would give shaving great-grandpa a miss.
