Sarah Moon French, b. 1941

You are looking down into the Tuileries in winter, from a window high enough to turn the garden into a diagram. A circular basin sits near the top, pale as a coin dropped on dark ground. Below it the hedges run in long black bands, the chestnuts are bare, and the gravel walk along the bottom has been swept almost white. Four or five people stand about on it in dark coats, small enough to read as punctuation.

It is a very orderly picture, and then you notice the man on the right. He moved while the shutter was open and has come out as a smear, a dark streak with no edges, leaving the garden at his own speed. Everybody else held still. He did not, and so he is the only person here who is unmistakably alive. The others have come out as solid little marks, hats and overcoats, the kind of figure an architect draws in to show the scale of a building.

Le Nôtre laid this garden out for a king, and the geometry has outlasted everyone who ever walked in it, which was presumably the idea. Sarah Moon's print pushes back a little. The trees fur out at their edges, the light goes grainy, the whole thing drifts towards the condition of something half remembered rather than seen. Give it a minute and you are no longer sure whether you are looking at the Tuileries or at somebody's recollection of an afternoon there. The blurred man is the giveaway. He got out.