to stay in his frame, a mystic in a material age." Friendships and personal life Among the artist's many professional and personal connections was his relationship with the British sculptor Alfred Gilbert. Seven years older than Paulus, in the 1890s Gilbert had become "the most famous sculptor in England" and "the foremost sculptor of his age," but in 1901 declared bankruptcy, fell into disgrace, and moved his family to Bruges. It appears to be in this period, when Gilbert was at a low ebb and the younger Paulus was on the rise (he first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1904), that the two Anglophone artists in Bruges became close friends and colleagues. When Paulus opened his art school in Bruges in 1905, an advertisement in The Studio promised that Gilbert would be an "honored visitor" at classes. The two artists seemed to bring out the best in each other. When Gilbert sculpted a bust of Paulus, shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1906, the work received extravagant praise. The Art Journal wrote,Mr. Alfred Gilbert's bust of Francis Petrus Paulus is remarkable for the sensitiveness of the modelling. If one were not afraid of the impulse of first impressions, one might regard it as a unique thing in its kind for the extraordinarily sensitive and nervous touch which it displays. It suggests something of the quality which one finds in the verse of Gérard de Nerval: it is the art of nerves, of the incessant striving after subtle and elusive achievement, something on the borderland of imagination. The Academy wrote that the bust was endowed with "the divine spark. Certainly beside this tempestuous head and heaving breast all other busts seem tame and dead." On the other side of the Atlantic, The Nation wrote that the bust "has the distinction of life and vigor and character." For his part, Paulus painted Gilbert's mother; the portrait was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1907, the Exposition Générale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1907, and The London Salon of 1908, and demonstrated "his keen appreciation of the subtler and finer phases of human nature, and he has ensured the presence of the deeper, the more abiding, and essential character of the subject." In 1909 Paulus painted Alfred Gilbert, and the result was "the most interesting portrait Mr. Paulus ever painted…a portrait which will certainly be handed down to posterity and