Most women are not so young as they are painted.

Beerbohm’s epigram turns on the double sense of “painted”: literally portrayed in art and cosmetically “painted” with makeup. The joke depends on a social convention—women being represented (by artists, admirers, and by their own presentation) as younger than they are. Read more broadly, it satirizes the gap between appearance and reality and the cultural pressure to idealize female youth. The line also reflects Beerbohm’s characteristic urbane, slightly barbed wit: it is less a factual claim than a commentary on how representation (portraiture, flattery, fashion) edits age into something negotiable.