An occasional game I play, when the days are shortening and the grasses still bear their dusty flowers, is to search for a certain 500-year-old scrap of turf. An ordinary patch of grasses and weeds – dandelions, plantain, yarrow, maybe if I’m really lucky a stem or two of burnet saxifrage. The patch I’m looking for is The Great Piece of Turf, painted by Albrecht Dürer in 1503.

The watercolour itself is in the Albertina museum in Vienna and I’ve never seen it in person, but a postcard of this favourite painting ...

 

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