Sometimes I walked past quite fast, rapid sideways glance, just to check that he was still there among the 17th-century paintings. The more tortuous the relationship, the more I preferred the Dutchman. How can it be that I did not know how he got them, did I never ask? Such mysteries we leave undisturbed like a perfect meniscus when young. I even saw A View of Delft late on a winter’s night, slipping in with a painter who had visiting rights after hours. Later on, in a new job in Soho, I would zigzag through Chinatown and into the back door of the museum to look at the art at lunchtime. Once, I remember repeating the route on my return and glimpsing the picture twice in one day, just to cancel out the inbetween time of misunderstanding and impasse. What you see is what you see, yours alone and always true to you, no matter what anyone else contends.

The relationship we have with them is so singular and unique that nobody can gainsay our experience. For pictures can shore you up, remind you who you are and what you stand for. The Dutchman gave me luck, or perhaps it was courage. I used to walk down Charing Cross Road from the publishing house where I worked, slip through the side entrance of the National Gallery to see the art, and then catch the tube to meet someone with whom I was having an almost comically doomed affair. This painting became a kind of staging post for me on a specific journey across London. The more tortuous the relationship, the more I preferred the Dutchman His preoccupation was magnetic, contemporary, the pose of thought so subtle and familiar as he waits for someone to come, for something to happen, for life to catch alight. He looked as if he might be about to remove a fleck of tobacco with practised elegance from his lips we smoked roll-ups back then. I only cared about his darkly handsome presence, head tilted, absorbed, the timeless outsider. Maybe he had made them, or was just trying to sell them, possibly both. In those early days, I didn’t care why the man was sitting by a table or about his instruments – the polished lute, the viola with its deep curlicues. ‘My eyes keep returning to him’: A View of Delft, 1652 by Carel Fabritius. Delft holds its pleasures somewhere over that bridge. The picture, polarised between the shadows and the sunlit stage, takes off towards the bright side, the road sweeping over the canal and into the centre of town, beneath a blue sky that casts its reflection on the waters below. He is not even looking at this view of Delft, though in a sense we are all gathered before it. I do not know why the title ignores him in favour of the place, or the stall, as if where the scene is set matters more than he does. But his vision takes you so close to this man that if he relaxed into movement and dropped his arm down across the table, with its sonorous blue cloth and its musical instruments, he could almost touch you with the tips of his fingers. It is true that he presents a view of the little ringed city of Delft, canal-crossed and storeyed, with recognisable streets and spires. Titles are an oddly new invention, evidently unknown or unnecessary to artists of that time, and nobody knows what Fabritius might have called his painting, if anything at all. According to the writing so discreetly lettered on the wall behind the lute, it was painted by C Fabritius in 1652. The picture in which he appears is nowadays known as A View of Delft, With a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall. But he stayed still, never changing, ever faithful in his time and place, while I tried to make my way in this unfamiliar city without knowing where I was going or what I was doing. He too was on the brink of something, or perhaps nothing at all, a loner on the edge of events. But he remains forever on the outskirts.Īrriving in London for the first time, in my early 20s, I found a strange counterpart in this painted figure. Before him, the cobbles rise up and over the gently swelling bridge into a brighter world of red-roofed houses and church spires and dappled light elsewhere. It puts you on the spot on this quiet day when the leaves of the young elms are just beginning to turn and the man in black sits low at the crossroads. The painting, so small and mysterious, is peculiarly alive to the nearness of your presence. For you are here too, somehow, hovering on exact eye level with the man and his table. Two musical instruments lie next to him on a table: a lute, shining like a new chestnut freed from the husk, and a viola that reaches invitingly towards you as if just asking for its strings to be plucked.

It shows a man seated in deep shadow at the corner of two streets, thumb to chin and fingers crooked as if nursing the remains of a cigarette, eyes down and pensive waiting. It has to me the atmosphere of a memory or a waking dream. I love a painting that hangs in the National Gallery in London.

Girl on horse sketch