References in A Private View (1994), that most painterly of Brookners, range from Tintoretto to Odilon Redon and Walter Sickert. (Brookner has George Bland visit the Sickert exhibition at the Royal Academy, thus placing the action of the novel in the winter of 1992-3.) But most memorable for me is Bland's vision of himself at some debilitated future moment, glad to be able to recall a detail from a landscape by Rubens. One wonders: Which might it be? One knows the Rainbow Landscape in the Wallace Collection or the View of Het Steen in the National Gallery - or perhaps it is the Kermis in the Louvre? I cherish them all - and all because of George Bland, all because of Brookner.
'I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.'