The London Lounge

This also flows from a post by couch in the Clinging to the Wreckage thread. Maybe members might like to suggest candidates, who should rank here. It is not intended to be a Labour of Hercules - just a little light-hearted (but argumentative and informative), fun. Moses and Noah must rate and Socrates and all the obvious ones but there are lesser known men too who might be mentioned as Old Masters, as opposed to Enfants Terribles...and some who give us pause to consider; such as Salvador Dali, Picaso, F E Smith, Stravinsky, Guy de Maupassant, Hemingway, Erno Goldfinger, Frederick Scholte, Ozwald Boateng and so on...
NJS_ oooOOO

Papa Haydn.

PG Wodehouse
John Mortimer

If Hem lived long enough to be considered old we have broadly expanded our sample...

I'm presuming by your example you mean gents who were successfully productive late in the game as opposed to late bloomers. In no particular order:

Albert Hadley
Peter O'Toole
Mick Jagger
Helmut Newton
Irving Penn
Jim Harrison
George Plimpton
John Updike
Auden
Enzo Ferrari
Elmore Leonard
Cormac McCarthy (who should have won the Nobel for literature but, as it happens, our president jotted down a grocery list, the committee came across it and well...)

et al...

I don't think that we need to worry about order, as such but maybe we sould add something besides the name or it'll just be a list - but I suppose that the real interest is in members' perceptions of these people so, maybe, even that doesn't matter too much.

A few more:

Abraham;
Moses;
Noah;
Cicero;
Geoffrey Chaucer;
Shakespeare;
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (especially for his commemorative poems);
H W Longfellow;
W B Yeats (my own favourite Yeats' poems are "A Prayer For my Daughter" and "Among School Children" - which I learned by heart sitting high up in a Holm oak tree);
Rudyard Kipling;
Edward (Omar Khayyam) FitzGerald (all the first edition volumes were 'remaindered' for nearly nothing - be nice to have one of those);
Leonardo (Da Vinci - not Di Caprio - although I have to say that he gave a great performance in Aviator and might well be here in 30 years);
Spencer Tracy (didn't live to be that old but in for "Father of The Bride" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner");
Henry Fonda ("On Golden Pond" with the elderly Katherine Hepburn is unforgettable);
Tintoretto naturally;
Noel Coward;
Frederick Lonsdale (another English playwright);
Albert Finney (his interpreatation of Churchill in "The Gathering Storm" is a masterpiece);
Henry Irving;
Sarah Bernhardt (I think that women can be old masters too!);
Gladys Cooper (carried on acting);
Daphne du Maurier (carried on writing);
Rosa (Cavendish Hotel) Lewis (just carried on!);
Sir John Betjeman (works on architecture as well as his charming poetry);
Sir Henry Rider Haggard;
George du Maurier (for his late-blooming novels besides the earlier Punch cartoons).

It also occurs to me that there should be another category of daring adventurers - to cover such people as Peter Fleming; W O Bentley; Woolf (Blue Train Bentley) Barnato and such people.

NJS

I remember the story about Hermann Hesse visiting Thomas Mann in exile. Hesse had been told to be careful with the wet, slippery stone steps in the garden, to which he would have replied it would be an honor to break his leg in the house of the great old master.

Stefan Zweig

Claudio Monteverdi

Paolo Uccello

Nicholas:

Sam Clemens aka Mark Twain.

JMB

Evelyn Waugh