From the Oval Portrait by Poe

[frindle2]

Hello. I'm wondering what the underlined part exactly means.
Those sentences below are from <The Oval Portrait> by Edgar Allan Poe.
Does it mean "he(the painter) scarcely turned his eyes off from canvas, and he even would not see the face of his wife"?
Thank you.

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But at length, as the labor drew nearer to its conclusion, there were admitted none into the turret;
for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from canvas merely,even to regard the countenance of his wife.
And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn fro the cheeks of her who sat beside him.

 

[probus]

Apparently he is painting a portrait of his wife, although I do not have the text to hand.

It is an old-fashioned, even outdated, use of "merely" in my opinion. Nowadays we would say "He never turned his eyes from the canvas, even to look at the face of his wife."