The Avenue

 All Hallows' Eve, and a big day for birthdays – notably John Keats (born 1795), the diarist and gardener John Evelyn (1620), and two painters of the Dutch Golden Age: Johannes Vermeer (1632) and, born in 1638, Meindert Hobbema. 
  A pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael, Hobbema was a fine landscape painter, with a particular gift for painting trees, an essential element in his best compositions. The most famous, and one of the greatest of all Dutch landscape paintings, is his extraordinary The Avenue at Middelharnis, one of the treasures of our own National Gallery. A strikingly geometrical composition, almost like an advanced exercise in perspective, it has long fascinated other artists, including Van Gogh. Oddly, The Avenue of Middelharnis was one of the paintings that haunted my boyhood, as it was reproduced in one of the books I browsed in endlessly (The Book of Everlasting Things? A Thousand Beautiful Things?). And another was Van Gogh's The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, a painting with something of a Middelharnis feel, which (this must have been in an encyclopaedia) I remember as being  represented in yellow, cyan and magenta to illustrate three-colour printing. The original went missing in the bombing of Germany during the Hitler War – a sad loss.