The earliest painting in the Balthus retrospective that was at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne over the summer dated from 1922, when the artist was fourteen years old.[1]“Balthus” was on view at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, from May 29 through August 29, 1993. A French-language catalogue, with essays by Jean Leymarie, Jean Rodolphe de Salis, Jean Starobinski, and Jorg Zutter, has been published by Skira/Musée cantonal des Beaux Arts (120 pages, 50 Swiss francs). This strikingly precocious composition, in tempera on paper, brings together a knight, an angel, and a horse in a design that has overtones of Piero della Francesca; titled The Angel’s Message to the Knight of Strattligen, it was a proposal (not accepted) for a decoration for a church at Einigen, on the Lake of Thun. The most recent painting in the show, The Cat with Mirror III, is said to have left Balthus’s studio only a matter of weeks before the show opened; it is the latest addition to a series of paintings, each depicting a girl seated on a bed playing with a cat, that has been one of Balthus’s chief preoccupations since the late 1970s. In between the 1922 work and the 1993 work there were some four dozen paintings and many more dozen drawings and watercolors: landscapes, portraits, a few still lifes, street scenes, and the nudes that have made Balthus not only famous but also notorious. The show, which was organized with the