I went particularly to see the gallery's Hugh Ramsay exhibit, a major retrospective of the works of the fine Australian painter (1866-1906) whose life was cut short at 28 by tuberculosis.

I've always admired Ramsay, and was always going to go the exhibition anyway, but have especially got my gallery-going skates on since my recent cataract surgeries.

Where, previously, with faulty eyesight, I used to imagine seeing things in paintings that weren't really there (seated on Jesus' far left in Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper I thought there was an orangutan) now I see in paintings things that were there all the time but I wasn't able to see before. Now I see that the figure to Jesus' left is after all not an orangutan but (a little disappointingly, for one had rather liked an orangutan being there) is only Simon the Zealot, just another human disciple.

One shy, small work in the Ramsay exhibition that rather haunts is his Lamplight (1897). It haunts because, as a blurry streetscape of a foggy evening in Melbourne (the painting arranged around a pinpoint of light from a streetlamp), it is so suggestive of how parts of Canberra look (transformed, disguised, even made mystical) by the current smogs.

How I hope that Canberra's suburban artists, much pilloried by me for their chocolate-box depictions of our city as a place of pretty parrots and eternal Floriades, are taking some pains to paint our city so extraordinarily transformed by these hazes, by the peculiar colours (amber! copper! apricot!) of filtered sunlight they produce, and by a haze-changed Canberra sun that is sometimes a fluffy golden sunflower, sometimes a pickled apricot and sometimes, eerily, a ginger moon.

Canberra artists who are finding no inspirations during these times of meteorological terror need to take a good look at themselves.

Hugh Ramsay took lots of good looks at himself and, from his many self-portraits, seemed to rather like what he saw. There are flattering portrayals of himself, sometimes stylishly dressed (now in a smoking jacket, now in a dressing gown) and posingly juxtaposed with his easel and other furnishings, which suggest the painter had Adonis tickets on himself.

When he holds a cigarette, Ramsay holds it stylishly, just as gorgeous young men used to hold their cigarettes in those advertisements that portrayed cigarette-smoking as something glamorous done by the enviably posh.

Give me instead the ruthlessly honest painters of self-portraits (Van Gogh, say, or Rembrandt or Edvard Munch) who show us their torments and wrinkles.

But my companion at the Ramsay exhibition, daring to disagree with me (feminism has given so many of today's women minds of their own!), said that Ramsay looks young and beautiful in all of his self-portraits because he actually WAS young and beautiful, and, having died so young, had no wrinkles to depict. Always blessed with a young nose that looked like a nose, he had no scope to imitate Rembrandt, who in old age had (and duly painted) a nose that looked like a potato.

She had a point, my assertive companion. But I know that if I had been a painter when I was young and improbably beautiful I would have given my self-portrayed self a faked flaw (a small wart perhaps, or a light sprinkling of freckles) so that I didn't look too beautiful to be true.

But while Ramsay's self-portraits raise doubts, his portraits of others are wondrous. Little girls seem about to pop out of their frames to ask to play with us. His adult sister Madge (1902) radiates personality, and seems about to stride out of her frame (ducking so as not to catch her spectacular hat) to give us an extraordinarily well-informed expert tour of the exhibition.

And (and I swear this has nothing to do with my cataract surgery giving me a new, unseemly interest in such things), when I played the game "Which Work Would I Take Home If I Could?" (a game we should all play whenever we go to an art exhibition to help bring out our inner connoisseur), I chose a little crayon drawing, Seated Female Nude (1894).

It and its companion crayon drawing, Nude Study (1895), both done from life at some kind of advanced Melbourne art class, somehow manage (I don't know how) to deeply humanise the two women portrayed. Both of them look a little world-weary, and preoccupied, as if thinking about deep novels they may just have read, or perhaps the problems they have at home - perhaps connected to the struggles that have required them to take this demeaning and notoriously poorly paid work (posing naked for art students).

In the famous Pete and Dud sketch set in a grand art gallery, the two working-class ignoramuses sit, eating their sandwiches, and discussing the ways in which the voluptuous female nudes in pictures seem to suggestively follow a man around a gallery space, wherever he goes.

For Pete and Dud this, the nudes stalking us, was the true proof of the success of an artist's portrayal of nude women.

But the comedians made their sketch in the sexist 1960s, and for me, a modern, woke man of the 21st century, the success of Ramsay's two studies lay in the way in which the two naked women, perhaps strong feminists, barely even looked up to notice me, let alone bothered to follow me around the room.