In Honoré de Balzac’s 1831 story “The Unknown Masterpiece,” the young artist Nicolas Poussin presents himself at the studio of Porbus, a seventeenth-century court painter, hoping to inhale the fumes of creative genius. It is a stroke of luck that his visit coincides with that of the eminent Frenhofer, Porbus’s own mentor, who possesses “the secret of giving figures life.” When he reveals that he has been secretly laboring over a single portrait for a decade, Poussin is possessed by the desire to see it. As Frenhofer claims the delay is partly due to the lack of an ideal model, Poussin barters a sitting with his beautiful mistress, Gillette, in exchange for a look at the painting. When he and Porbus finally lay eyes on Frenhofer’s work, they are speechless. Not because, as the old master claims, he has achieved “the look and the actual solidity of nature,” but because they struggle to discern anything beyond “a chaos of colors, shapes, and vague shadings, a kind of incoherent mist.” Upon hearing that his canvas contains “nothing,” Frenhofer is enraged, then bereft. He burns his paintings and dies in the night.
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