Tristesse (Sadness)

A boy and girl crying at the grave of their father during the First World War. The girl is kneeling; the boy standing behind. There is a cap on the wooden cross marking the father's grave. In the margin lower right the artist has drawn a miniature portrait of the head and shoulders of the girl in left profile. Louis Abel-Truchet was born at Versailles, France, in 1857, and died in action on the Western Front on 9 September 1918. He was a well known French painter, etcher and lithographer who studied in Paris with two highly renowned teachers, Jules Lefebvre and Benjamin Constant. He began exhibiting at the Paris Salons about 1891.