The French writer Charles Péguy remarked, in 1913 that the world had 'changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it had in the last 30 years.'
From 1913 to 2023 the word 'change' itself takes on quite a different meaning, making change incalculable.
For a person born in Péguy's time, today's world would be quite shocking, technologically and economically, but also spiritually, societally and culturally, and, specifically for the purposes of this column, with regard to art, which has been through many -isms and today makes us sometimes wonder about the role of semantics at the expense of creative passion.
This thought, and how art can and should be used to remind us of our history, and even taught, occurred to me as I looked at the once-in-a-lifetime special collection of the relatively few and widely dispersed works of the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, ending at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum today.
For Dutch people, the recent fine and very expensive restoration of the 19th-century Rijksmuseum allows them to represent their distinctive past in the best possible way. The permanent collection presents famous Dutch paintings, sculptures, objects, pieces of crafts from the grand epoch, ship models and pieces of furniture.
It was a cultural eye-opener, as was a visit to Rembrandt's house, with his own art collection, and the Moko museum of modern art, with its revolutionary and digital art by international living artists such as Bansky, Hirst, Emin and The Kid - a new kid on the block.
At school in Trinidad we were introduced to Western art from the period of the Renaissance through the 17th century - mainly Spanish and Dutch - to the 19th-century French Impressionists, whose influence is still widely seen in many modern painters' work, and to the famous artists of those periods. Their amazing images are so deeply etched in the memory that when one sees the actual paintings they have a great familiarity; only the size of the canvas or the intensity of colour might surprise. The paintings published in Nelson's West Indian Reader were even more indelibly engraved on our young, receptive brains.
Last weekend, as the car I was in approached Salisbury Cathedral, which sports the highest church spire in England, I did not see the real, beautiful thing before my eyes but the remarkable 19th-century John Constable painting that I had gazed at repeatedly when still a child and which lives in my head.
It is not an experience unique to me, and must be due to the accompanying essay on picture composition in the Reader, which was not part of an art class, but general reading. Later, studying Shakespeare's Hamlet at Advanced level, the depth of the Prince of Denmark's loss was more appreciated by evoking the image in the earlier West Indian Reader of Millais' delicate pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia, lying afloat, but dead, after drowning in the river.
Our art teachers, nevertheless, drew a strict line between the European world of study and reference and the other, real world of local w