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Dear Friend: 'There you go, dear," sharply, "always bringing up the other hand. What's the use of trying to look in all directions at once?"
"And you, Bert, always jumping like a starving trout at the first bright fly. Really, dear. Do you buy your merchandise that way? I wonder that we're still solvent."
I made the experiment according to the process which you know, my dear friend, and I saw on the white paper all that part of the bird-house which can be seen from the window and a faint image of the window sashes which were less illuminated than the exterior objects. This is only a very imperfect attempt.... The possibility of painting in this way seems to me almost demonstrated. That which you have foreseen has happened. The background of the picture is black, and the objects white, that is, lighter than the background.
The picture was painted on the same day that he received news of the death of his old friend Julio Gonzalez, a fellow sculptor who used to join him in many of his experiments in Boisgeloup. There are two ways in which suffering appears to be taken for granted in this painting: his grief over his friend's death and his despair of the times unite in a cheerless memento mori that could not have been formulated more desperately by any of the Christians of the Middle Ages.
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