We think we detect a date: in the 1860s, is it? – for that would fit. But no, it is merely a calligraphy of shadow and reflection, which leaves (overhanging it) have trailed across the stream in the foreground.

Then the painter’s name, Maltby. This, we find, occurs in the standard reference book, but with different initials.

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Watercolour overlaid with bodycolour. ‘Ruskinian’ a friend calls it. And so it is: in its anxious piety – in the endeavour to speak, crisply, of the transitory variegations of light on bark, or, where a bough has been shorn off, of light on pith; everywhere modified by the intervention of leaves, translucent or shadow-casting. Ruskinian, too, in the implied continuity of the given world with whatever a mesh of boughs and branches, contained within an arbitrary rectangle, can itself contain. Speaking, then, of the world at large, the picture expounds no painter, is devotional.

Encrusted with light, the leaves lose substance. Fretted with bodycolour, surface becomes depth. It is a sunny day. In our looking, we cool ourselves on the banks of a stream. We are somewhere in the depths of a wood. No people, no birds or beasts, and the world is still.

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The craftsman who will restore it seems to care as much for frame, mount and glass as for the picture. ‘Fine handmade glass, that’ – and how can he tell? He holds it horizontal to the eye and, see, light moves in waves across the lucid, tumbling surface, as if engendered by the glass itself. A still, translucent sea – becalmed – of greens and blues. Hung in its frame the glass, like the foliage it reserves for us, both absorbs and reflects, draws in and throws back such light as has entered the room. To the eye of the room-dweller, it interprets the light of the forest.

The frame is of oak. Dull with bituminous varnish and begrimed, until I stripped it with caustic. Then as the water dried, a rose-colour seemed to flush, elusively, in the damp grain of it. We shall preserve what we can of that, and the glass. But the mount has decayed, gone brown. And the card the picture was stuck on is pocked with mould: ‘Foxing’ says the craftsman – an impurity in the glue can cause it, or a dead fly. All this must be renewed.

It used to hang, I remember, in the dullest room of my parents’ house, a room usually locked. Later, I rescued it from a windowless box-room. I have hung it near a window now, well in the light.

On occasion the shade of the room blends with the shade of the woodland. Though often, where a tree trunk casts its shadow, daylight falls. Or the pool of imperfect glass becomes opaque with reflections that ripple above inferred profundity. From the other side of the room one begins to see (after long acquaintance) how the picture’s uniformity of surface actually appears to tilt inwards, receding into distance through a region of paint where the light’s greenish tints are touched with blue.

This blue is a threshold, the frame its gate or door. The wood is uninhabited. Let the picture’s making and preserving restore to the woodland its absent spirits, recall to the hearthside our household gods.