ARTISTS AND THEIR FAVOURITE TREES 2: horse chestnut

​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.