Sir, - According to your reviewer Brian Fallon (February 10th) Vermeer's "View of Delft" was James Joyce's favourite painting. Co-incidentally, it was also Marcel Proust's. In his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, he has the writer Bergotte, who had ceased for years to go out of doors, rising from his deathbed to view the painting at an exhibition of Dutch art.
When the two greatest novelists of the century met at a party in May 1921, they famously had nothing to say to each other. If only the word Vermeer had been spoken, it could have been the commencement of a lifelong friendship (i.e. one year). - Yours, etc.,
F McEvoy, Hebron Road, Kilkenny.