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Just as there are writers' writers, so there are painters' painters.

Necessary exemplars, moral guides, embodiers of the art.

Often they are quiet artists who lack a shalty biography,

who go about their work with modest pertinacity, believing the art greater than the artist.

Noisier painters sometimes unwisely patronise them. In France, the 18th century gave us Chardin, the 19th century Corro and the 20th

Brach, all true north on the artistic compass. Their relationship with their descendants is

sometimes one of influence, more usually one of semi-private conversation across the centuries.

Lucien Freud doing versions of Chardin, Hodgkin painting after

Coro. But it also goes beyond that, beyond admiration, beyond style, homage, imitation. Van Gogh,

even as he is violently wrenching himself towards a form of painting, which still startles us today,

was filling his letters and his mind

with thoughts of Koro. He also greatly valued Chardin. It was a tribute by the living artist

to his predecessor's clarity of seeing, an acknowledgement that this is what painting is.

Just as the young John Richardson, visiting Brach's studio for the first time,

felt that he had arrived at the very heart of painting.

But these apparently quiet artists often turn out to have been more far-sighted

and more radical than we assume.

Coro, for example, once dreamed the whole of Impressionism. As Van Gogh

ripped to his brother Theo in May 1888, when good pair Corro said a few days before he died,

Last night I saw in my dreams landscapes with entirely pink skies. Well, didn't they come,

those pink skies, and yellow and green into the bargain in impressionist landscapes?

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