​Ancient trees continued to inspire artists. In the 1850s, the Pre-Raphaelites were painting landscapes out of doors in sunlight, trying to incorporate every detail they could see into their brightly-coloured canvases. William Henry Millais spent part of the summer of 1852 with his more famous brother John Everett, lodging at the George Inn in Bromley, Kent. While John Everett painted a courtship scene, The Proscribed Royalist, with its hero hiding in a hollow tree, his older brother was painting a portrait of an ancient pollarded oak tree.
 
The resulting oil painting, Hayes Common, is slightly smaller than Sandby’s Beech Tree.  The artist has painstakingly traced the spread of the branches, with almost every leaf being given its distinctive shape.  The gnarled and embossed trunk is equally carefully studied.  Oaks were known for their longevity, and regarded as symbols of history and of national identity.  William Henry Millais’s decision to include the little girl may have been an attempt to make the painting more saleable, but it also underlines the contrast between the human lifespan and that of the tree, which has seen centuries come and go.
 
Hayes Common was rejected by the Royal Academy – probably because the more conservative members of the Academy disliked the bright greens of Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting – and William Henry Millais seems to have been discouraged. At any rate, he never painted anything so ambitious again.

​William Henry Millais, Hayes Common, 1852-3. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art

​Samuel Palmer also loved trees: in 1824 he wrote in his sketchbook: “sometimes trees are seen as men. I saw one a princess walking stately with a majestic train.” In his Shoreham period Palmer created magical landscapes, meant to suggest the beauties of heaven, and trees were essential to his vision. The textures of their trunks are carefully delineated, their leaves outlined and silhouetted against glowing twilight skies, or creating effects of velvety blackness in the moonlight.
 
Palmer was particularly fond of the horse chestnut tree, which some writers argued was unpicturesque. Palmer noted the tightly-furled leaves in early spring “peculiar at a little distance like horizontal pencil dashes.” But he loved it most of all in May, when the flowers gave it the appearance of overflowing abundance that he sought to communicate in all his visionary work.
 
The Pastoral with a Horse Chestnut Tree shows how trees, people and animals coexist in a symbiotic relationship, the sheep enjoying the shade cast by the tree while the shepherd (or shepherdess) settles comfortably into the curve of its trunk. By choosing to paint a young tree, Palmer was able to fit the entire tree into a small watercolour, and also to evoke the youthful innocence of springtime.
 

​Samuel Palmer, Pastoral with a Horse Chestnut Tree, c. 1831-2. Watercolour with gouache. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

​Paul Sandby, An Ancient Beech Tree, 1794. Bodycolour. Victoria and Albert Museum.
 
British artists have long been fascinated by trees. It goes without saying that trees are important in landscape painting, but some artists are satisfied with a generic tree: a trunk and branches, some rough brushstrokes for foliage, enough to suggest the idea of a tree without bothering to define it as oak, or ash, or beech. But in the years around 1800 many books were published on the characters of trees – that is, on the different species. Writers argued over the respective aesthetic merits of different trees: was the oak the most beautiful tree? Or the beech? Was the horse chestnut in flower a fine, or a disagreeable sight?
 
The eighteenth-century watercolourist Paul Sandby painted many types of trees, but his favourite was surely the beech, the most common tree in the woodlands of southern England. In the 1760s he was given a commission, to paint a series of watercolours of the trees in Luton Park, Bedfordshire.  Now part of the Luton Hoo Hotel, it still has a magnificent beech-lined drive.  Sandby went on painting beech trees all his life. His Ancient Beech Tree is a large painting in watercolour and bodycolour, in a gold frame. The painting is a portrait of a specific tree: its strong personality dominates the composition, and it dwarfs the human beings and animals around its base.
 
You can see that Sandby loved drawing the muscular branches that reach out in all directions like arms, twisting and turning as if in movement, the exposed roots that cling to the ground, and the feathery foliage that leaves the trunk and branches exposed. Because of its smooth bark, drawing a beech tree is perhaps the closest analogy, in the tree world, to drawing the human figure.