Ruth und Boas

Bazille never finished this. In the summer of 1870 he was a promising young painter, a friend of Monet and Renoir, working on a night scene from the Book of Ruth: Boaz asleep in the fields under a thin crescent moon, an image he took from a Victor Hugo poem. In a letter that June he says it is only half done. Then war broke out between France and Prussia, and Bazille, who was not obliged to go, enlisted. On the 28th of November he led an assault at Beaune-la-Rolande, was hit twice, and was killed. He was 28. The canvas stayed as he left it. Much later an X-ray found another of his pictures hidden underneath, an earlier work he had painted over.