"I don’t recall what book on abnormal psychology it was that I was leafing through, but I might easily have passed the name Fregoli had it not been for the fact that the great quick-change actor and I share a given name. Once a famous music-hall performer, he is now as obscure as the rare mental disorder that bears his name. Its victims are certain that all the people who surround them are in fact disguised stand-ins for a single malign character! For all that it’s rare, it is also an attractive speculation to those of us who practice the representational arts: identities? disguises? tropes? Our daily bread, you might say! I was more fascinated by Fregoli himself than by the Delusion, and I tried to turn my fantasy of his performance into something painterly, but without much success. Until, that is, something else came along, and that was a colour-interval. Matisse had painted a little picture, it must have been during the war of 14-18 as the French say, of the head of a faun, mostly in pink and gray. I have now had this colour-dyad in my head for over fifty years, and have employed it from time to time; but when it arrived holus-bolus in my painting, the thing just about painted itself."