"As far as 'Melancholy' concerned, or as he liked to call it 'Evaporated Dreams', on that painting he worked most times during the last years of his life, when his eyes got less and less reliable. When he died the painting stood on his easel. Often he spoke about it with bitterness, as if it should express the nature of his own life. With his almost lost drawing [using no lines] and his subdued color, it sometimes seemed to me the saddest possible emblem of all the unhappiness of his fate."