PROFESSOR CHRISTIANA PAYNE
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Trees IN 19th-century British AND AMERICAN art

The role of trees in landscape painting, c. 1760-1870

ARTISTS AND THEIR FAVOURITE TREES 2: horse chestnut

10/22/2016

2 Comments

 
​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.
 
Picture
​Samuel Palmer, Pastoral with a Horse Chestnut Tree, c. 1831-2. Watercolour with gouache. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
2 Comments
alexander
10/26/2016 01:09:19 pm

Hello Professor Payne,
This is just a note to say that I have been enjoying
visiting your Tree Blog again . I first found it a year or so ago
but had never left any comment , in fact I've never left a
comment on any Blog ever, but as your most recent entry
carries Samuel Palmer's Chestnut Tree I felt I could,especially
as his picture 'A Hilly Scene' is looking at me from the wall
behind my PC . Also it didn't seem right to be enjoying
your writings without a simple thank you. One of the things
I am presently trying to find more information on is the cause
of the sad state that some of the Horse Chestnut trees
seem to be in this autumn and how fast the problem seems
to be spreading.
thank you alexander

Reply
Ho Rse Arlem link
1/21/2021 07:14:47 pm

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    Author

    You can read a review of it hereFrom c. 2010-2017, I was engaged in research for a book on trees in British art, asking questions, such as: how does the interest in trees develop, how do ideas change over the 18th and 19th centuries? I looked at drawing manuals, illustrated books on trees, oil paintings, watercolours and prints, landscape gardening, poetry, artists' writings. The artists I found most important and/or interesting included the following: Paul Sandby, Thomas Hearne, John Constable, Samuel Palmer, James Ward, John Martin, Edward Lear, Francis Danby, Jacob George Strutt and Henry William Burgess.

    The book has now been published by Sansom and Company and its title is "Silent Witnesses: Trees in British Art, 1760-1870". You can read a review of it here.

    My next research project is taking a look across the Atlantic and at the role of trees in American painting of c. 1800-1870. I'm getting to know new trees - hemlocks, red oaks, white pines - and new artists - Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, Frederic Church, Worthington Whittredge, William Trost Richards. 

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