Two Balthus canvases hang at right angles in the same room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the pairing is quietly strange. One is a twelve-foot alpine panorama full of people. The other is a single figure in an airless bedroom. Eighteen years and an entire temperament separate them. The big one is The Mountain, finished in 1937, oil on canvas, about 249 by 366 centimetres. It was the largest thing Balthus had painted to that point, and he did it in a cramped Paris studio from memory.