A suggestion: stop whatever you are doing and go to Leeds and see this exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute. However familiar you may be with Titian’s “Portrait of a Lady” (c1510-12, pictured) in the National Gallery, seeing it here perfectly positioned on modern walls and in unexpected company will result in a fresher, newer you. Sombre, tantalising and glowing in the daylight, the painting of the rose madder dress is like looking into a pond. Something about the almost-smile and lift of the eyebrow is familiar, and then the whole physical thing lands right in your lap. Even the frame looks dandy.

Titian’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’

As the title clearly hints, the exhibition is about painters looking at sculpture and, in one or two cases, seeing sculpturally. It is in fact much more in tune with the John Baldessari show currently at Tate Modern because in both exhibitions there is a transformation, a response to a response. Baldessari uses and sometimes paints words. Words, like art, are a retort. What you say when you hit your thumb with a hammer is not necessarily art but if you were to make a painting of the word “Ouch” you would be observing human behaviour in much the same way as these painters are.

This is the first time the Henry Moore Institute has put on a show only of paintings. Because they are more used to placing sculpture you are somehow aware of the volume of each room, and it almost feels as if you can walk around each painting.

I found myself standing and gawping at the sheer here-ness and slight weirdness of George Scholz’s “Female Nude with Plaster Bust”. This may well be the nearest I get to knowing what it feels like to be a woman sitting in a room on her own, thinking her own thoughts. The skin is warm with the lovely, slightly dirty colour that skin really has. Forget the plaster bust, the girl is the sculpture.

There are such varied things here: the Pre-Raphaelite William Dyce almost drowning in detail, a beautiful chocolate box confection by Louis Gauffier of Pygmalion watching his stone Galatea bloom into flesh – not a great painting but who cares.

Near the Titian is a Euan Uglow. There is no sculpture in it and there does not need to be. Although different in temperament to the Scholz, the naked woman in dabs of thin paint in “The Lightest Painting on Earth” is a becoming presence. It is helped by not being overlit. One evening years ago I sat not so enamoured for longer than I intended with one of his early pictures, a painting of a pregnant girl. I think I was meant to be listening to a lecture. As the light grew dimmer and the girl became more real and heavier, I realised I had misjudged the artist.

In another part of the room is “Autumn” by Jacob de Wit. This really is sculpture in painting, a white discoloration imitating stucco relief and clinging to the wall like a dew drop, the kind of architectural whim they loved in the 18th century. Its mood foretells the Yves Tanguy next to it where surreal forms in unearthly shades saunter across an empty landscape. Suddenly nothing is what it seems any more.

One more juxtaposition: Tim Braden’s recent work “Looking at Sculpture”, an ethereal and watery pigment of a Giacometti block of bronze, sits in a corner with a William Nicholson painted almost a century earlier. In a taciturn encounter Nicholson puts a Rodin bronze against creamy and decorative blanc de Chine, a fox among hens. Rodin and Nicholson are contemporaries. Braden is looking further into the distance, examining what could well be the desk of a collector or an auctioneer with papers and provenance carefully arranged. While they look good together the paintings land a different punch. Nicholson in his understated way is charged, fired up by the Rodin he owns. Contemporary art disturbs in a way the work of dead artists does not. The painting is Nicholson noticing.

Exhibition continues until January 10; Humphrey Ocean’s exhibition of paintings, ‘Perfectly Ordinary’, is at the Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury, UK, until November 7