With only weeks to live, he found mixing colors too time-consuming. His last drawing was a pen-and-ink landscape—the lake and the woods beyond. Rather than draw the woods as a solid black shape, he drew the trees individually. He was getting weaker by the day and there were thousands of trees. Did he hope that as long as there were trees still to be drawn, he would be allowed to finish?

He drew the trees as thick, black, nuanced lines running from the top of the paper to the horizon, a pencil line. From the horizon to the bottom of the paper, he drew the trees’ less stable gray reflections in the lake.

He worked long hours for a man who was dying. He returned to his studio every morning, if only to sleep in his armchair.

Just shy of total blackness, while a few bright shafts of white paper remained, he put away his pen and ink and asked me to help him back to bed, which he never again left.