“I cannot get enough of Dutch art. You can turn to this other world -- and it is a picture world as no other, a whole society visualised through time and place, seasons and generations, moment by moment -- and live inside it in your thoughts. There is always more of it, and then inexhaustibly more. Every time I think I have seen my last Dutch painting another comes into view, in some old museum or faraway city. I once saw, in a hotel in Algiers, a Dutch still life of redcurrants glinting on a silver dish and was momentarily transported to a long-ago Delft day. Paintings can take you anywhere, but they are also a land in themselves, a society, a place to be.”