At the museum

Yesterday I went to the art museum I worked at for a dozen years to say goodbye to it. The museum isn't going anyplace; I am. It's doubtful that I'll be alive in two years and even if I am, the amputation of my right leg will be so high up I'll only be able to use crutches for the rest of whatever life remains. That's no way to wander in an art museum and I think at my age (I'll be sixty in a few months) I'll always be too self conscious to use a wheelchair.
It was a good day for a museum trip. I went early, not long after they opened. Outside, slate gray clouds drizzled rain on cold asphalt. Inside, as the morning hours passed, more and more people came in. Families with kids who didn't know that museums are not good places in which to run and shout. Couples stuffed with brunch strolling through galleries. Lone visitors in search of the companionship art supplies.
I avoided anything modern. Not out of dislike; I wanted to see only art that has endured, bad or good. Anything done in the last or in this century was off my list.
The thing about paintings is that they're hard to do. When you see one and it seems to be of a simple scene, it's easy to shrug at the idea of an artist spending a great deal of time on it and then walk away in search of other works to see. But often, if you look closely, you'll see that you may have missed something.
An example in my case is the French artist François' Bonvin's (1817–1887) The Engraver (1872).
I doubt I would've have thought much about it if I didn't work at the museum and pass by it as often as I did. It looked to me like a simple painting at first:

Francois Bonvin's The Engraver

 A woman is bringing a man a bowl of something—probably a stew of some kind—to a man who is probably her husband (she's wearing a wedding ring), while he works at his profession, engraving; a dull art that paid the bills. 
If you look more closely, however, you see what's really going on. See the easel? The portfolio? The simply framed works on the wall?
Look at her face:

Look at his hunched, defeated posture:

You realize that the story this painting is telling is of an artist with some talent—those are his works he's hung—but it's either not enough to lift him from his modest circumstances or it's gone unrecognized, unappreciated. 
Bonvin was one of nine children. One of them, a younger brother named Léon, was also an artist but failed to be as successful as his older brother, despite François' help and, after being unable to sell his work, hung himself at the age of thirty-two.
Is this painting, done six years after that awful event, Bonvin saying we should learn to accept defeat and settle? Or is it showing the lasting, humiliating misery of doing just that? 
The painting tells a sad story many of us know well, so well that even 146 years after Bonvin told it, we get it.