All year around he is there, miles from any one.  He says he came to Oregon because he felt that it was there that he would find material for a great historical canvas.  He found it in the gathering at Champoeg on May 2, 1843, when Oregon, by a narrow margin, voted to join the United States.  When Gegoux made his picture, but one of the original 52 pioneers who were present at the meeting was still alive.  He is dead now.  
Gegoux found pictures of 28 of the participants in that historical gathering.  It would be hard to paint the others but the artist had a happy inspiration.  At the critical moment of the convention, Joe Meek strode out of the convention hall, followed by a number of others.  Gegoux chose for his scene the door yard of the hall with Meek the central figure.  The door was open and the shadowy forms of others could be seen inside.  "You see," said Gegoux, "those of whom I had pictures I could paint outside, those whose pictures were unobtainable had not yet left the building."  
The coloring and perspective of the picture are remarkable.  The figures in it live and it is brimming with power and vigor.  Gegoux had hoped that the state of Oregon would buy the canvas.  He is in no way bitter about it, that lovable old man whose life is going, too, like the mist on the river.  He has no illusions.  In a letter to a friend he said, "I regret that conditions are such, but it is inevitable, I feel, owing to the fact that this part of the United States is still in its infancy.  Until 79 years ago last May this vast piece of land, comprising Oregon, Washington, Idaho and a part of Montana, was yet unclaimed by any civilized nation.  Indians were here and, of course, claimed priority.  So, after all, it is not to be wondered at.  Events are not considered history until all eyewitnesses have passed away and the monuments over their graves are covered with moss.  So I must not expect to reap financial returns from my several years of labor, even thought my expenditure of time and money really stranded me here."  
And here is tragedy.  "I love to portray nature on canvas, and many are the partly finished pictures awaiting the last touch of the brush, but I refrain from using up nerve forces.  Always I am in the hope of feeling more vigorous tomorrow, but somehow, the tomorrow is like the sign over the door, which read the same each day."  "I am in hope that some wealthy individual will come to my rescue before I pass out of this life and buy that historical painting and present it to the state of Oregon.  It would be a commendable monument to the giver, as I would cause to be affixed to the frame of the painting a bronze tablet on which the name of the donor, together with his or her portrait, also in bronze, would be moulded."  For Gegoux is a sculptor as well.  He knows his arts.  He has taught in the great conservatories of Brussels, in New York and in Canada.  He is artist through and through.  He makes his own violins, beautiful instruments of maple, and he has a dream that some day he'll produce one, more beautiful than all the others, that will articulate.  A dream that goes beyond the bounds of sanity (?) perhaps.  He'll admit it if you ask him.  But the painting is his chief sorrow.  "They will not buy it," he said.  "They spend thousands of dollars to bring an old warship-a thing of ugliness and not of beauty-here and to keep her free from rust.  Well and good, for patriotism is beautiful; but oh, my beautiful painting, which is my life, they do not want it.  I have traveled.  I am an artist and I know what it is.  It is great-my masterpiece- "Forgive me.  I am an old man and a vain one.  I am not discontented, but I am a little sad.  Sometimes I think that I should scrape my few pennies together and take my picture away to California, where it is not cold and where there are no floods to wash down upon me in winter time.  But that is bitterness and I am not a man given to bitterness. Forgive me."  
Gegoux came to Oregon nearly a dozen years ago.  His home was formerly in Watertown, N. Y., from which place he left under mysterious circumstances.  He left his home there to visit friends in Ohio and never returned.  For many years nothing was ever heard of him, but a few years ago a Watertown friend found him in Seattle, Wash., where he had won much fame as a portrait painter.  Three years ago his studio was destroyed by fire and since that time ill-fortune has pursued him.