This painting plays on the enduring stereotype of the artist as a fragile, suffering being. The scene unfolds quietly: a cleaner enters, believing the room to be empty, while the artist contemplates a rash act. The Romantic image of the tormented artist, once a mark of authenticity, has become a marketable persona, a brand of emotional capital dressed in melancholy. The cleaner, absorbed in her routine, remains invisible to this spectacle of self-conscious despair. Her indifference is neither cruel nor careless, but an unconscious refusal to participate in another’s performance of suffering. The painting turns this encounter into an allegory of perception and class, of who is seen and who is unseen. It is also a reflection on the everyday moment in which we all, at some point, enter a room thinking it is empty, only to realise it was never empty at all.