He was poor; he had great difficulty in managing to live.

The delicacy, the purity, the suavity of his genius could shine forth in their entirety nowhere but in the convent of the Carthusians, whose cloister he was commissioned to decorate.

There he painted the life of St.Bruno, breathing into this almost mystical work all the religious poetry of his soul and of his talent, ever delicate and chaste even in the allegorical figures of mythology with which he before long adorned the Hotel Lambert.

He had returned to his favorite pursuits, embellishing the churches of Paris with incomparable works, when, overwhelmed by the loss of his wife, and exhausted by the painful efforts of his genius, he died at thirty-seven, in that convent of the Carthusians which he glorified with his talent, at the same time that he edified the monks with his religious zeal.

Lesueur succumbed in a struggle too rude and too rough for his pure and delicate nature.