Imagine a woman in hot pursuit of an elusive idea, a woman stopped dead in her tracks in Amsterdam, seized unexpectedly by a painting:

Jeanette Winterson wondered what she was to do as she stood transfixed in silent obedience to the painting’s call.

Shaken by her experience, Winterson fled to the comfort and safety of a nearby bookshop, seeking shelter in familiar things. She had intended to leave Amsterdam the next day but extended her stay to visit the city’s museums, where she found two things of note as she faced her own anxiety: ‘The paintings were perfectly at ease. I had fallen in love and I had no language. I was dog-dumb.’

From selected books about visual art, Winterson hoped to acquire a language that would not only allow her to reason with herself about the power of the arresting image and her personal reaction to it but would also give her a way to think about the image itself, the painting as painting. She had fallen into the gap between knowing and not knowing, but instead of walking away in frustration, she persevered.

Later, Winterson wrote a book grounded in this experience – a book not just about paintings but about art in general and our personal relationship to it. Art Objects reveals how we can think of objects such as books, paintings, essays and novels.