A well-disguised mystic, a scribe who has got beyond books, to the point where the wisdom of masters begins the absurd wisdom which writes its final word on water. It would not be entirely wrong, either, to call Kruger a master of the love-poem, a first-rate painter of landscapes and climates, a reviver of the Roman Elegy, a painter's poet. But he is all these things with a difference: there is a remainder which in rational terms should not exist, which one will only discover if one is not looking for it and which is everything.