[14] Much later, Sage stated that "these were the happiest days of my life",[15] and she told friend and gallery owner Julien Levy in 1961 that her campagna experience shaped her "perspective idea of distance and going away.

"[16] Nonetheless, in later years Sage usually claimed that she was self-taught perhaps because, as one of her biographers, Judith Suther, states, most of what she had learned in Rome bore so little relationship to the kind of painting she eventually did that "she felt as if she had studied with no one.

"[17] Sage met a young Italian nobleman, Ranieri Bourbon del Monte Santa Maria, Prince di San Faustino, in Rome around 1923[18] and fell in love with him, believing at first, as she wrote to a friend in 1924, that he was "me in another form.

"[22] Her husband was content with their lifestyle, but Sage was not: as she wrote in her autobiography, China Eggs, "Some sort of inner sense in me was reserving my potentialities for something better and more constructive.

[27] In December 1936, as she prepared to leave Italy and move to Paris, Sage had her first solo art exhibit, six oil paintings shown at the Galleria del Milione in Milan.

These semiabstract paintings, including Afterwards and The World Is Blue, borrowed motifs and styles from de Chirico and the Surrealists but showed hints of Sage's own future work as well.

[33] Art historian Whitney Chadwick states that Sage's paintings were "imbued with an aura of purified form and a sense of motionlessness and impending doom found nowhere else in Surrealism.

One came from Greek poet Nicolas Calas, who recalled that he and Tanguy accompanied Surrealist leader André Breton to the Surindépendants exhibit and were impressed enough by Sage's paintings to seek her out.

Sage, still well off, was generous with her money and the group of impoverished artists badly needed such support, but some resented her wealth and what they felt was a haughty attitude that fitted her former title of "Princess" all too well.

[39] Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, beginning World War II, and Sage sailed back to the United States a month later.

She immediately set up plans to help the Surrealists immigrate as well and establish themselves in the new country by means of art exhibitions—starting with Tanguy, who joined her in New York City in November.

[45] Their large home was decorated with numerous pieces of Surrealist art and a variety of unusual objects, including a stuffed raven in a cage and an Eskimo mask.

"Again and again Sage is described [by people who knew her] as imperious, forbidding, moody, quick to anger, remote, private, solitary, aloof, contradictory, and unapproachable," Judith Suther writes.

[51] In the Third Sleep won the Watson F. Blair Purchase Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago in October 1945, Sage's first major public recognition.

[61] With the help of longtime friend Marcel Duhamel—and her own subsidies to cover most of the printing costs—Sage arranged for a book of this poetry, Demain, Monsieur Silber, to be published in France in June 1957.

She filed her will in Waterbury in December 1958, and on April 28–29, 1959, a few weeks after she completed a massive catalogue of Tanguy's paintings, she attempted to end her life with an overdose of sleeping pills.

[66] Unfortunately, the surgeries were painful and had only limited success,[67] and by this time she was suffering from other health problems as well, including some that may have resulted from her years of heavy smoking and drinking.

"[80] Suther and others also point out differences between the two artists: for example, the large architectural constructions that dominate Sage's paintings are quite unlike the smaller biomorphic or metallic forms that people associate with Tanguy's landscapes.

Most of Sage's paintings focus on free-standing architectural structures, including walls, towers, and latticework, which could represent buildings either under construction or ruined and decaying.

(Le Passage, one of Sage's last paintings, is perhaps the only one containing a definite human figure; even Small Portrait, thought by many to be a self-portrait, is hardly recognizable as a face.)

"[85] In addition to her autobiography, China Eggs, and four Surrealist one-act plays, Sage wrote several books of poetry, three in French, one in English and one in Italian.