Ramón Masats Spanish, 17/03/1931–4/03/2024

A woman has sat down on a folding stool in a gallery of the Prado. Heavy fur coat, tweed dress, black heels, a cylindrical handbag laid flat on her lap with one hand resting on it. The other hand has gone up to the frame of her glasses and stopped there. She is looking down at nothing in particular. On the wall above her hangs a small old-master portrait in a heavy silver frame, a man with long hair and a wide moustache who looks straight out of his canvas at whoever passes. In the left foreground, far too close to the lens, the back of somebody's head has gone completely out of focus.

The painted man has been looking out of that frame since long before anyone in the room was born, and he will go on doing it. The woman has been tired for about four seconds. Painting deals in the permanent condition; a photograph can only ever carry off a slice of one particular afternoon, and this one has carried off a woman with sore feet in a building full of eternity. Masats saw the arrangement and did not improve it. He stood where the two of them lined up.

The joke is obvious and it is not why the picture lasts. What lasts is the fur slipping off the edge of a stool too small for it, the handbag set down flat so it will not fall, the shoes she is going to be glad to take off. Museums are full of people quietly looking after their own bodies while great art goes on above their heads. The portrait will still be on that wall in another century. She will not, and neither will the stool, and this photograph is the only thing that thought either of them worth keeping.