Before he died last year, Edward Said mused on the powers of the artist late in life: “What of the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health (which, in a younger person, brings on the possibility of an untimely end)? These issues, which interest me for obvious personal reasons, have led me to look at the way in which the work of some artists acquires a new idiom towards the end of their lives – what I’ve come to think of as a late style.”