Friendship and Sacrifice Theme Analysis

Ultimately, Behrman’s “great masterpiece” is not a typical painting, but a single leaf he has painted onto the wall—a leaf so realistic that both Johnsy and Sue believe it is truly the last leaf on the vine. This masterpiece saves Johnsy’s life by returning her will to live. Because he went outside in a storm to paint the leaf, however, Behrman catches pneumonia and dies. This sacrifice is not the only selfless act in the story: although the three protagonists have few possessions to call their own, they survive hardship by loving and caring for one another.

Although the characters in “The Last Leaf” lead difficult artistic lives, they find meaningful connections to others in Greenwich Village. Sue and Johnsy have left their families in Maine and California, but they meet in a restaurant on Eighth Street and form a new household together. The cantankerous old artist Behrman—who has lived alone for forty years—nevertheless feels a powerful love and responsibility for his neighbors: “[H]e regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above.”

When Johnsy first becomes ill, she turns away from human companionship, which seems to equate social isolation with illness and death. Convinced that she is dying, Johnsy wants to be alone: “Couldn’t you work in the other room?” she asks Sue “coldly.” In response to Sue’s desperate call to stay alive for her, Johnsy doesn’t respond, lost in her own solitude and depression. “The lonesomest thing in the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey,” observes the narrator. “One by one the ties that held her to friendship and to earth were loosed.” Without her friendships, Johnsy would have succumbed to her own melancholy and died: it’s Sue’s attention and Behrman’s act of kindness in painting the leaf that restore her to health.

The story may finally suggest that Behrman’s “masterpiece” isn’t a painting at all—rather, his culminating achievement is the sacrifice of his own life to save Johnsy. Ultimately, he finds inspiration not by painting alone in his “dark room,” but by using his artistic gifts for the benefit of another person. Indeed, “The Last Leaf” suggests that artistic success, health, and even life depend on the social bonds of friendship that, in the narrator’s words, “tie” people “to earth.” Ultimately, Behrman’s masterpiece is his gift for friendship.