The Convalescent

Carolus-Duran nearly died of an illness in 1858, and a few years later he turned that experience into a large canvas called The Visit to the Convalescent. Unhappy with the result, he cut it up and kept only two pieces. A painting of a big white and tan dog, offered at auction in New York in 2012, is almost certainly the other survivor. This one is the patient. He sleeps sitting up, a pillow pushed behind his head, the red of his shirt loud against the dark room. A carafe, a glass of water and a yellow book stand within reach on the table. At the edge of the canvas, the fingers of a hand reach in from someone who is no longer in the picture. The French State bought the fragment in 1919, two years after the painter's death.