The Mesdag Garden Oak

Hendrik Willem Mesdag painted the largest painting in the Netherlands, and this oak was already forty or fifty years old when he did it. The Panorama Mesdag, finished in 1881, is a cylindrical view of the Scheveningen beach fourteen metres high and a hundred and twenty round, and Mesdag lived a short walk from it, at Laan van Meerdervoort 7, in the house that is now a museum of the collection he built. The garden came with the house. The register dates this oak to the 1830s, which puts it a little under two centuries old, and notes a second oak of exactly the same age standing next to it, two trees side by side. Mesdag bought paintings the way other people buy furniture, filling the house with Barbizon and Hague School canvases until it needed a purpose built gallery bolted onto the back to hold them. The oaks were the view from all of it, and they were here before the collection, before the panorama and before the street reached this far. You reach them through De Mesdag Collectie in his old house. It is the only tree on this list that comes with a room full of Corots.