Central Park is an artificial environment. It is nature ordered and directed by at least one masterful designer, Frederick Law Olmstead – though Calvert Vaux did a little work there too. I don’t particularly like places that are consciously made. Nature does a better job with asymmetry than we do. Yet because nature was perceived as subordinate in those days – though that hasn’t changed a whole lot – and there had to be a park, Creation was sensitively re-made to suit the needs of a population that needed a place where there was nature enough for everybody.

Yet the place abounds in beautiful vistas for which nature was the inspiration. Statuary, fountains, foot-bridges, ragged stone walls: these define the man-made embellishments of a place that goes wild Uptown, where you can get lost in the architecture of glacier-sculpted stone or wander into a glen that is fairly timeless.

I like the tension of the natural and man-made. I was able to indulge a taste for both in this painting, which shows a flight of steps, a boulder-strewn embankment, and parts of the forest Olmstead was wise enough to leave alone whenever he could.