Staël's paintings was so great that Paul Rosenberg raised his prices and continually requested more paintings. The demand was so high for his planned spring 1954 exhibition, that Rosenberg requested an additional fifteen paintings. Once again this exhibition was both commercially and critically successful. In April 1954 de Staël's fourth child Gustave was born. In that spring he had a successful exhibition in Paris at Jacques Dubourg's gallery. His new paintings marked his departure from abstraction and a return to figuration, still-life and landscape. In the fall of 1954, he moved with his family to Antibes. Death By 1953, de Staël's state led him to seek isolation in the south of France (eventually in Antibes). He suffered from exhaustion, insomnia and depression. In the wake of a disappointing meeting with disparaging art critic Douglas Cooper, on March 16, 1955 he committed suicide. He leapt to his death from his eleventh story studio terrace, in Antibes. He was 41 years old. Nicolas de Staël is buried at the Montrouge Cemetery. Legacy De Staël's painting career spans roughly 15 years (from 1940) and produced more than a thousand paintings. His work shows the influence of Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso (especially Picasso in his Blue and Rose periods), Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Chaïm Soutine, as well as of the Dutch masters Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hercules Seghers. During the 1940s and beginning in representation (especially landscapes, but also still lifes, and portraits), de Staël moved further and further toward abstraction. Evolving his own highly distinctive and abstract style, which bears comparison with the near-contemporary American Abstract Expressionist movement, and French Tachisme, but which he developed independently of them. Typically his paintings contained block-like slabs of colour, emerging as if struggling against one another across the surface of the image. Accordingly, when a Rothko painting was paired with one by Nicolas de Staël in the show of young French and American painters, Rothko commented to William Seitz (in 1952): "Blobs vs. blocks. They both begin with ‘b.‘ Comparisons are false!"". In fact, according to de Staël himself, he turned to his "abstracting" because he "found it awkward to paint an object as a likeness because of the awkwardness I felt when faced[!] with the infinite multitude of coexisting objects in any single object". De Staël's work was quickly recognized within the post-war art world, and he became one of the