Jackie Wullschläger

The madness of continuing struck him when an oak he had been depicting burst into leaf, and the only way to save five paintings was to persuade its owner to strip the foliage. Fifty francs produced “permission to remove the leaves from my beautiful oak tree… It was quite an effort to bring big enough ladders into this ravine. At last it’s done, two men have been working on it since yesterday. Isn’t it something to finish a winter landscape at this time?” he asked Alice on 9 May.