A sign of Parisian good taste
October 12 2012
Picture: Emma Rutherford
My colleague Emma Rutherford, in Paris for a conference on portrait miniatures, sends me this photo for my Van Dyck scrap book. She says that Avenue Van Dyck is 'pretty and tree-lined'. Bon.
I think we need a Van Dyck Avenue in London. But we having nothing so cultured. According to Google Maps, the closest we have here in the UK is a Van Dyck Close. It's on a housing estate sandwiched between the M3 and the Basingstoke ring road. Also on the estate is a Rembrandt Circle, Gainsborough Road, and Rubens Close. Excellent. Do any readers of AHN live there?
Update - a reader writes:
The avenue Van Dyck in Paris near the pleasant Parc Monceau is in quite pleasant company: avenue Velasquez (small but accessing the park), avenue Rembrandt, etc. The rue Rubens is in a more popular "quartier" near the Gobelins and less green or tree-lined.
While in England, a reader says:
I don’t live on Van Dyck Close but....my mum lives close by to Constable Road in Eastbourne (which connects to Gainsborough Crescent, Reynolds Road and Hogarth Road and Turner Close).
And another:
Correspondents have probably already said that there's also a Van Dyck Road in Colchester. Appropriately, Gainsborough Road branches off it and curves back to end on it.
There's another one in Ipswich, again surrounded by other artists. Landseer features prominently in both.
Suffolk probably does have a real sense of its role in painting.
