Tree time
The myriad shapes and moods of trees are a rich artistic source, finds Tim Richardson
Trees are among the most potentially expressive and dynamic subjects for artists. They can be creators of mood and atmosphere in landscape scenes and vessels for deep symbolism. However, with their complexity of texture and palpable liveliness, they are also one of the greatest technical challenges.
That tension is summed up in an anecdote, quoted in this wideranging survey, related by John Constable’s friend John Leslie: ‘The amiable but eccentric [William] Blake, looking through one of Constable’s sketchbooks, said of a beautiful drawing of an avenue of fir trees on Hampstead Heath, “Why, this is not a drawing, but inspiration,” and [Constable] replied, “I never knew it before; I meant it for drawing.”’
The author supposes that the pencil drawing in question is Fir Trees at Hampstead (1820). If that is true, one can understand Blake’s point, because the crazily leaning, wind-blown trees do indeed take the study far beyond the realms of mere technical draughtsmanship.
Blake himself produced a number of depictions of forest trees in which the plants seem to take on human characteristics.
The anthropomorphic impulse is a recurring theme, from renaissance depictions such as Veronese’s remarkable painting of Daphne morphing into a tree, up until the 20th century and Paul Nash, who proclaimed that: ‘I sincerely love and worship trees and know they are people and wonderfully beautiful people.’
Charles Watkins suggests that the elms in Nash’s The Three in the Night (1913) are ‘gossiping’ as they ‘mingle together in a curious combined canopy’.
Vincent van Gogh, painting the willow pollards by a road in Etten in 1881, wrote to his brother, Theo: ‘If one draws a pollard willow as if it were a living being, which after all is what it really is, then the surroundings follow almost by themselves, provided only that one has focused all one’s attention on that particular tree and not rested until there was some life in it.’
The book attempts to cover the topic of the tree across the entirety of Western art, with some Japanese examples thrown in, and a few bursts of contemporary art. It is necessarily light on detail and somewhat listy, at times resembling lecture notes; there are jolting jumps in time and space, as we move across centuries, continents and artistic movements.
The prose style is curt and workaday, with an emphasis placed on artists’ facility at depicting trees accurately, as opposed to their aesthetic and imaginative qualities, and there is no over-arching thesis or conclusion.
However, this is a useful book in its own way, offering botanical insight and valuable sections on artists as diverse as Leonardo, Millais, Klimt, Corot, Lear and Gainsborough—the last praised, above all, for his obsession with pollards.