“Ambition is a path, not a destination,” observed Wallace Stegner in Crossing to Safety (1987), “and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe.”
“Great” artists are often but not invariably guided by Stegnerian ambition. For those who flourish in old age, however, there is no “unconsidered, merely indulged” alternative—certainly for none of Richard Lacayo’s subjects in Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph: Titian, Goya, Monet, Matisse, Hopper, and Nevelson. (Only the latter two are given first names in the book’s table of contents.)
