Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt *

It is the time of year when people get out from wherever they keep them their sweeping brushes, old and new, and scrape away the dry brown leaves, mostly old, as they fall in greater and greater numbers from their tall and creaking trees, often ending up scrunched like bank notes beneath our feet. I am minded to concentrate on one of the pieces done by the artist along this theme. A meditation. It has for example several thousand dry brown leaves in the foreground. These are also at the foot of and around a single modern pram, and in the pram is a child, the artist's son as it happens, aged perhaps three or four, in an autumn-coloured coat and brown trousers, with his hands gently clasped on his lap, and his eyes staring out, upwards slightly, from beneath a hand-knitted hat. Now, between him and the leaves is a slightly frosted stretch of grass, like a blue river, and lining the distance, beneath an almost moody sky, a faintly thunderous blue sky, are some fifty-odd trees, and the hint of a bandstand with its allusion to music, or ghosts of bands past. Hanging from the side of the pram is the artist's handbag, a mad affair which looks part-tapestry, part-lingerie, and part-Victoriana. On the back of the pram is a navy-blue plastic bag. Who knows what this contains but it could be milk or food or tissues or all three. The shadow of the pram points leftwards - the sun is bright and the light as crisp as the leaves - and haunts further some of the fallen leaves. The dominant feature though is one of contemplation. The child seems to represent life and the leaves seem to represent death. It is an iconic image. It is an image that will be subliminally familiar to many people, especially mothers. It does not look down at us, but it seems to know more than us. If you look closely enough, the eyes of the child may even be peering at the sky, or towards the heavens. What is interesting, too, is the presence of green leaves on the trees in the background, some of them not evergreens, and this pricks our interest further about the tree, which we do not see, that has shed so many crisp brown leaves in the foreground. It is life and death done with love.
* William Allingham (1821-1889)