His voice, which had been growing angrier with each sentence, halted abruptly. He resumed in a somewhat calmer tone.

“Well, it doesn’t recover anything that’s lost, and it doesn’t encapsulate anything meaningful either. It’s a placebo. Not only that, but I remember hearing about this painting a while ago and one of its other many champions said something along the lines of how skilled the artist was because of how much like a photograph the painting was.”

I nodded.

“That’s true,” I ventured.

“Like a photograph!” he sneered. “Since when has that been a method of evaluating art? That’s like me saying I liked a certain piece of music because the musicians responsible for it were good actors in their video for that piece of music, which is a pathetic argument. Painting is painting and photography is photography. Photography is illusion – falsity. For the art of painting to aspire to the ethos of photography is to take art backwards to the “naturalist” school of art – naturalists who believed that showing “things as they were” was good art.

“If, technically, this painting is a reasonable copy of something disgusting, which it looks to be, then fine – let’s just acknowledge that all it is a reasonable copy of something disgusting and leave it at that. But no, instead it ends up with all sorts of adjective-filled praise, elevating it to an undeserved “work of art” status, and the dauber to artist. Let’s be frank,” he said, turning back to the painting. “It wouldn’t really look out of place on the front of a chocolate box, would it?”

Angrily – and as a champion of Embden’s work – I refuted his extreme evaluation, but, of course, the painting wouldn’t have looked out of place on the front of a chocolate – or jigsaw puzzle – box either, but I didn’t mention that.

“It’s a very good – meaning technically excellent – watercolour. Your unfounded criticism of it won’t alter that fact.”

“Unfounded!” He paused for a moment, then turned and picked up a chair similar to the one I was secured to. For a second, I thought he was going to strike me with it. Then he placed it in front of me and sat down on it.

“Let me tell you this,” he said firmly, “if you think my criticism is unfounded or unfair, then ask yourself this: Why is it a watercolour? What sort of medium is that for an artist of the twenty-first century? Durer first used watercolours for landscapes during the Renaissance, and by van Dyck in the fifteenth century. Both of them, amongst others, used watercolours to paint their versions of monarch and government-sponsored innocent pastoral scenes. Innocent! The pastoral scene is never innocent. It is politically loaded.