'I have begun to think,' he wrote in a late letter,
'that one cannot help others at all.' This
from a man who once called friendship the highest
virtue. And in another he wrote: 'Will I ever
attain the end for which I have striven so long?'
His greatest aspiration was certainty
yet his doubts made him blame himself wrongly,
perceiving each painting a disaster. These swings
between boldness and mistrust, intimacy and isolation
led him to stay at home, keep himself concealed,
becoming a sort of hermit, whose passion for the world
directed every brushstroke, changed each creation
into an expression of tenderness, which he dismissed
writing: 'a vague sense of apprehension persists.'