Father Time is a personification of time. In recent centuries he is usually depicted as an elderly bearded man, sometimes with wings, dressed in a robe and carrying a scythe and an hourglass or other timekeeping device.
A 19th-century Father Time with Baby New Year
Detail of Father Time in the Rotunda Clock (1896)
Father Time in Fountain of Time
Father Time on an Irish memorial stone, displaying an empty hourglass to a mourning widow
In Ancient Greek religion and mythology, Cronus, Cronos, or Kronos was the leader and youngest of the first generation of Titans, the divine descendants of the primordial Gaia and Uranus. He overthrew his father and ruled during the mythological Golden Age, until he was overthrown by his own son Zeus and imprisoned in Tartarus. According to Plato, however, the deities Phorcys, Cronus, and Rhea were the eldest children of Oceanus and Tethys.
Rhea offers the stone to Cronus, red-figure ceramic vase c. 460-450 BC, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn [Cronus], 16th-century oil painting by Giorgio Vasari
Cronus devouring one of his sons, 17th-century oil painting by Peter Paul Rubens
Rhea giving the rock to Cronus, 19th-century painted frieze by Karl Friedrich Schinkel