Recently, I was asked to write an article on portraits of remarkable trees in George III's collection of topographical prints, held in the  British Library. I didn't know this collection at all, and was able to spend a happy afternoon looking at the prints in the huge volumes into which they have been pasted. The prints I chose to write about included portrayals of trees I already knew, such as the Cowthorpe Oak and the Moccas Oak, but also some others that were new to me.

I was especially intrigued by the great elm tree near Philadelphia, under which William Penn had concluded a treaty with the local Native Americans. The print illustrating this tree was produced simultaneously in London and Philadelphia in 1801, by publishers who had offices in both cities. The treaty was concluded in 1682; the print was made in 1801; only nine years later the tree was blown down in a storm.

​J. M. W. Turner, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – Italy, 1832. Tate Britain.
 

​Compared to some of his contemporaries, Turner was not overly interested in trees. He rarely made studies of trees on his travels, and in later life he apparently told one of his followers that he wished he could do without trees in his landscapes. His taste in trees was based on the paintings of his eighteenth-century predecessors, John Robert Cozens and Thomas Jones.
 
Many travellers to Italy admired the stone pines. In 1817 the poet William Wordsworth saw a solitary pine tree on Monte Mario and was told that his friend Sir George Beaumont had bought it to save it from being felled. Wordsworth described it as “one of the broad-topped pines, looking like a little cloud in the sky, with a slender stalk to connect it to its native earth.”
 
In his British landscapes, Turner shows a preference for slender trees, such as Scots pines and willows, rather than the major forest trees, oak, ash, beech and elm, and sometimes his supposedly British trees look remarkably Italianate. Their beautifully-shaped heads act like clouds in the sky, while their slender trunks seem to sway slightly in the breeze.
 
By the time Turner finally got to Italy in 1819, he had already painted many Italianate trees. In the Italian landscapes of his maturity, such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1832, Tate), there is often only a single tree, a tall stone pine with a slender trunk and a compact head of foliage, which became a kind of signature tree for him. 

​Edward Lear, Corfu from Ascension, c. 1860. Yale Center for British Art

​Edward Lear was the first British artist to give proper attention to olive trees. We have no difficulty finding olive trees beautiful today, but in the eighteenth century an artist visitor to Tivoli, Thomas Jones, thought them “thin & stragling” and only good for distances. Edward Lear saw his first olive trees at Lecco, on his way to Rome, and wrote to his sister Ann “I think them very beautiful, more like a huge lavender bush, or a fine grey willow than anything else, and all over green olives.” When he made drawings of Tivoli, he placed the olive trees in the foreground, lavishing attention on their twisting trunks and branches, with the villa at Tivoli and its famous waterfalls visible only in the distance, in a gap between the trees.
 
Lear also travelled extensively in Greece and Albania, and his favourite place was Corfu, of which he wrote “The extreme gardeny verdure – the fine olives, cypresses, almonds, and oranges, make the landscape so rich.”  Lear preferred the countryside, where the trees grew in a semi-wild state, to the formal gardens that had impressed his eighteenth-century predecessors, and he also seems to have had a fondness for trees useful to mankind, such as fruit or nut trees.
 
Later in life, on seeing Corfu again, he made this note in his diary: “the loved olive … No wonder the Olive is undrawn – unknown: so inaccessible = poetical = difficult are its belongings.”  In an oil painting, Corfu From Ascension he juxtaposes an olive grove with snow-capped mountains in the distance and ruins in the foreground. There are some goats near the ruins, but the olive trees seem even more alive than the animals, their trunks swaying like the movements of graceful dancers.