Research pinpoints peak age of creative genius
Ever worry that you’ve already peaked in life?
New data from an economist in the Netherlands may shed light on that nagging question.
Philip Hans Franses of the Erasmus School of Economics has been working for some years now to quantify human creativity — specifically, to determine at what age people such as writers, painters and musicians are at the peak of their careers.
You may have read about his previous work involving the age at which Nobel literature laureates wrote their prizewinning works, or when painters created their paintings most valued in the art world.
To those analyses, Franses recently added a study of when the top 100 classical composers wrote their most popular works, as determined by sales at classical music retailer Arkiv-Music.
You could quibble about Franses’s methodology. Is Beethoven’s crowdpleasing Fifth Symphony objectively better than the late string quartets? Is Jackson Pollock’s Number 8, 1950, superior to any of his other splattered canvases?
But Franses’s analyses make it possible to draw some interesting conclusions, particularly about when people tend to produce their most high-quality work. And the numbers show a remarkable degree of uniformity across the three domains of art, music and literature.
On average, Nobel Prize-winning writers produce their best work at age 45. Painters peak at age 42. And classical composers produce their most popular works at age 39.
Franses’s artists, writers and musicians peaked most often in their 30s. But the average peak age across the entire data set is 42. This is because while relatively few of these creative folks peaked before their 30s, plenty of them produced their most important works in their 40s, 50s and beyond.
There are some outliers. At one extreme, American composer Charles Ives produced his most popular work, Variations on “America”, at the tender age of 17. Seventeen! Did you produce any musical masterpieces before you graduated high school?
At the other end of the scale lies American painter Edward Hopper.
His Chair Car, painted when he was 83, sold at auction for $14 million (U.S.) in 2005, making it the priciest Hopper painting sold to that point.
It remains an open question to what extent Franses’s methodology accurately reflects “quality” in these specific domains. Beyond that, it’s unclear how much you can generalize from the experience of the world’s top writers, painters and musicians to the day-to-day output of the average person.
Still, his work offers a creative solution for quantifying a difficult-to-quantify phenomenon: human creativity.