The Brooknerian

Titian, The Death of Actaeon Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto Perseus and Andromeda Bacchus and Ariadne , left - referenced in Brookner's The Next Big Thing Nicolaes Maes, Girl at a Window , 1653-5, on loan from the Rijksmuseum It was a great pleasure at last to visit the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery, curtailed by lockdown but now resurrected. We find Titian's late masterworks painted for Philip II reunited for the first time. They're starry attractions and a great novelty, but finer still is the feeling of being in a gallery again. The National Gallery is much changed. It's practically deserted. You must book, cannot just wander in. It has lost that old communal feel. At times its bigger halls could feel like railway station concourses. Now one might be in Europe, not England. A great discovery downstairs, barely advertised: a Maes show, Dutch Golden Age painter. And beautifully lit, by which I mean almost in darkness.

Among several scuppered plans was a visit to see the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery, now closed. Seven late masterworks were included, reunited for the first time since they sat in Titian's studio in the second half of the sixteenth century. Paintings would take years, returned to after long absences. 'According to eye witnesses,' writes Martin Gayford, lucky enough to see the show, in this week's Spectator , 'Titian would begin a work, then lean it against the wall. Some time later he would scrutinise what he had done as if it were a "mortal enemy", add a touch or two, set it aside again to dry - and so on until he was satisfied ... there is a controversy about whether some of his late works ... were finished or not.' Brooknerians will know Titian from the much earlier Bacchus and Ariadne , part of the National Gallery's permanent collection. In The Next Big Thing Julius Herz, one of Brookner's later and most debilitated protagon...

A selection of Brooknerian paintings: Boucher, The Rising of the Sun , The Setting of the Sun . Who can forget that moment in A Family Romance when Jane Manning plunges from the heat of London in 1976 into the entrance hall of the Wallace Collection and, drowning in coolness and blueness, gazes up at the great Bouchers? Delaroche, Execution of Lady Jane Grey . Claire Pitt and a friend visit this painting in Undue Influence , a curious novel, costive and backward-looking (when it was published, it was the last of the yearly Brookners, and one might have been forgiven for thinking it her swansong). Delacroix, Jacob and the Angel . Herz, in The Next Big Thing , visits Paris and the church of St-Sulpice solely in order to see this painting again. I was in Paris when the novel came out. I remember buying it in the W. H. Smith's in rue de Rivoli; taking it back to my hotel to read; and then, a pure Brooknerian, setting out the next morning for St-Sulpice. Titian, Bacchus ...