The painting is set on a sea shore and shows in the foreground an aged man with his back turned to the viewer, walking towards two adults and two children on a hilltop overlooking a harbour.

[1] The figures are echoed by five ships shown in the harbour, each at a different distance from the shore, an allegorical reference to the different stages of human life, to the end of a journey, to the closeness of death.

Although many of Friedrich's paintings are set in imagined landscapes, The Stages of Life is recognisably located at Utkiek, near his birthplace of Greifswald in today's northeastern Germany.

The three groupings of figures (one aged man, two adults, and two children) echo the positioning of the ships at various distances from the shore as allegorical of the stages of life, and closeness to death.

The central ship is thought to represent the mother, while further inshore, two small boats—references to the two children—have only just begun their voyage and still remain in shallow, clear water.

The painting shows Friedrich's younger daughter Agnes Adelheid and his son Gustav Adolf holding a Swedish pennant 20 years after the cession of Greifswald to Prussia.