Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Maxwell Aitken

“Buy old masters” lands like sober financial advice, then swerves into a grin: “They fetch a better price than old mistresses.” Aitken, a businessman, isn’t just making a dirty joke; he’s staging a miniature morality play about capital’s cold clarity. The line works because it pretends to be about taste and prudence while quietly confessing that even taste can be an asset class.

The pun hinges on two marketplaces that once overlapped in polite society: art collecting and keeping a mistress. “Old masters” are canonical paintings, their value propped up by institutions, provenance, and a culture that treats certain names as blue-chip. “Old mistresses” evoke a personal arrangement that can’t be securitized, can’t be insured into legitimacy, and, crucially, depreciates in social standing as it ages. Aitken weaponizes that contrast. He’s implying that elite men often approach both art and women through acquisition, but only one purchase gets to masquerade as refinement.

The context matters: Aitken’s era saw the consolidation of wealth, the rise of conspicuous collecting, and a growing transatlantic trade in European art as status shorthand. In that world, art isn’t just beauty; it’s liquidity, credibility, inheritance. The mistress, by contrast, is expense without portfolio logic.

So the intent is advice, the subtext is indictment, and the joke is the sugar that makes the cynicism go down. It flatters the collector’s shrewdness while exposing the transactional impulse underneath.