These were the first two pictures Sohn painted in our family, but he was henceforth every year a welcome visitor, often making a stay of many weeks among us, and painting more than one portrait of each member of the family. He was inspired to his finest work, one of his many portraits of my mother--by seeing her in the ecstatic trance. So deeply had this impressed him, that it was almost under similar conditions that he worked, altogether removed from this earthly plane, blind and deaf to all that went on around him, and entirely absorbed in the contemplation of the radiant, transfigured countenance of his model, and in the feverish effort to transfer to his canvas some faint reflection of the wondrous radiance diffused over her whole person. In his despair of obtaining this effect from the ordinary resources of his palette, he was forever seeking some new means, devising some new combination of colour, he would fain have dipped his brush in pure light, have steeped the whole picture in unclouded sunshine! Something of this has been felt by all those who have striven, with like fidelity and with the same gross materials, to copy the dazzling hues even of some simple flower; has one but tried, with such poor pigments, with our muddy bismuths and dingy ochres, to reproduce the lily’s transparent whiteness or the rich gold of the humble buttercup, we can the better appreciate the vanity of all attempts at imitating on so feeble and limited a scale, the radiant tints and subtle, endless gradations of Nature’s colour-box, employed by the Divine Artist! We must needs perforce, for lack of the clear strong light, throw up our dim half-lights and faded colours by deeper shadows. But Sohn for this once would none of such artifice. Disdaining every expedient of contrast, he laid on the colours simply and boldly, after the manner of the Early Masters, painting with the pious enthusiasm, the sacred fire that was theirs, and borrowing something of their technical methods to impart the expression of holy rapture to the face, a diaphanous delicacy to the folded hands, to give to the kneeling figure the semblance of a martyr at the stake, a saint to whose beatific vision the gates of Heaven are flung open wide!