It has proved difficult to separate the usually melodramatically rendered life from a creative achievement that, despite a further number of successfully achieved canvases, depends essentially on the series, Landscapes with Handless Man, a linked sequence of large canvases created in the last years of life before (as he perhaps unbelievably claimed) the events they illustrate and his later incarceration, after a charge of murder in a Mental Institution. After the first Exhibition of the Landscapes, Matthews achieved a cult status which to some extent has continued to the present.