17 the government, which organized the exposition, abandoned Brussels. The date of his departure is unknown, but by February 1915 Paulus was back in Detroit. He was not to return to Belgium until the war was over. World War I and after Having fled the invasion of Belgium by Germany, Paulus returned to the Detroit, where in February 1915 he had an exhibit at the Detroit Museum of Art of over fifty paintings, pastels, and etchings. For much of 1915, at the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco, work by Paulus was on view in the section devoted to Belgium, an exhibition that elicited great sympathy from the crowd for "valiant Belgium." He remained in Michigan for the duration of the war, but found himself unable to work. "The great war…had a paralytic effect upon the art production of Mr. Paulus," who "agonized over the titanic struggle, feeling keenly the disasters, or jubilating over the victories as they were reported…For three years he waited for the inspiration which did not come." But as Allied victory loomed in Europe, "the artist in him blazed anew," inspired by "an enchanted isle full of resplendent color"—the scenery around Pointe aux Pins on Bois Blanc Island, in the Straits of Mackinac between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The result was an exhibition of thirty Recent Paintings of Northern Michigan at the Detroit Museum of Art in 1919. Noting the acquisition in 1920 of 36 etchings from all phases of his career, the Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts said that "Paulus' etchings are marked by a command of his medium, a wide range of effects and a natural aptitude for the work," resulting in "the thin delicate soft line that, in the hands of the master, can produce an effect possible by no other means." Later that year the Institute acquired his painting Fish Market of Bruges, a work "characterized by a true artist's insight into the beauty of things," capturing the "atmospheric affect which pervades that medieval city and gives it its peculiar individuality." After the war, Paulus resumed his visits to Bruges. In 1926, for his painting Fish Market, Bruges, he received the Detroit Museum of Art Founders Society Prize, and a profile in The American Magazine of Art called him "one of the artist-poets who have refused to compromise, who insists on painting what he loves and has the courage