Pan. It was Cannan who was responsible for introducing Lady Ottoline Morrell to Gertler's paintings and encouraging her to support his work. Cannan closely based the young Jewish character of his 1916 novel Mendel on Gertler's early life including his infatuation and affair with fellow artist Dora Carrington. This relationship remained unfulfilled as Carrington spurned his numerous advances and instead declared her love for Lytton Strachey. The friendship of Cannan and Gertler waned after 1916, largely because of Cannan's increasingly unstable behaviour. Virginia Woolf recorded her impressions of Gertler after he came to visit her and her husband in Sussex in September 1918. As he left they cried, "Good God, what an egoist!" We have been talking about Gertler to Gertler for some 30 hours; it is like putting a microscope to your eye. One molehill is wonderfully clear; the surrounding world ceases to exist. But he is a forcible young man; if limited, able & respectable within those limits; as hard as a cricket ball; & as tightly rounded & stuffed in at the edges. We discussed—well, it always came back to Gertler. "I have a very peculiar character ... I am not like any other artist ... My picture would not have those blank spaces ... I don't see that, because in my case I have a sense which other people don’t have ... I saw in a moment what she had never dreamt of seeing ..." & so on. And if you do slip a little away, he watches very jealously, from his own point of view, & somehow tricks you back again. He hoards an insatiable vanity. I suspect the truth to be that he is very anxious for the good opinion of people like ourselves, & would immensely like to be thought well of by Duncan [Grant], Vanessa [Bell] & Roger [Fry]. His triumphs have been too cheap so far. However this is honestly outspoken, & as I say, he has power & intelligence, & will, one sees, paint good interesting pictures, though some rupture of the brain would have to take place before he could be a painter. Gertler's later works developed a sometimes very harsh edge, influenced by his increasing ill health. In 1920 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which forced him to enter a sanatorium on a number of occasions during the twenties and thirties. Two of Gertler's close friends, D. H.