...Moore was an eccentric, sharing his life with his daschund dog, and an army of cats, which effectively took over his home. Not only was he unconcerned by personal comfort, he really failed to look after himself. From the early 1880s his health started to decline, and in the early 1890s he developed the cancerous growth on his thigh which killed him. Moore spent his last months in a grim race with death, struggling to complete his large picture “The Loves of The Winds and The Seasons.” Moore chose to devote the short time left to him working on this picture, and to this end excluded from his life old friends. Sir Merton Russell-Cotes visited him, however, and left behind a record of their meeting in his journal. The dying artist spent his last days in a heroic struggle for his art. From this there has grown up an exaggerated idea of the solitariness of Moore's life. Paul Ripley shares further thoughts on the artist: "Moore was a real outsider, but his aesthetic decorative images are staggeringly well-painted and beautiful. In Blackburn art gallery is The Love of the Winds and Seasons. Moore battled to paint this vast picture as he was dying of cancer. He completed it about 10 days before his death. He isolated himself from friends and family in a last heroic effort to complete his picture, and HE DID IT. The picture perhaps gives some idea of the direction his art would have taken had not death intervened. His figures had facial expressions, and showed feelings. Whether this is better, worse, or just different I do not know. Birmingham City Art Gallery owns Dreamers which has been displayed with maximum incompetence and insensitivity for many years. I have been fighting them on behalf of the artist. The picture has been placed between an Alma-Tadema, and a Brett sea picture. Their bright colors murder it. They have been doing, due to incompetence, what the RA did deliberately in Moore's lifetime. Last time I was in the gallery they seemed to have re-arranged the pictures, with some improvement in the effect. I like to think that I may have played some small part in this." (http://www.artrenewal.org/pages/artist.php?artistid=734)