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 4: sweet chestnut

11/22/2016

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Picture
​Francis Danby, Children by a Brook, c.1822. Yale Center for British Art.
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​Francis Danby exhibited a painting, Clearing up after a Summer Shower, at the Royal Academy in London in 1822. The painting is now lost, but we know about it from a description by Richard Redgrave, who drew attention to “a group of chestnuts and other trees, their wetted leaves coming like emeralds off the dark cloud.” Leaves “like emeralds” also appear in Danby’s charming painting of Children by a Brook. I believe these are the large leaves of the sweet or Spanish chestnut, made semi-transparent by the strong sunlight shining through them.
 
The artists of the first half of the nineteenth century loved the contrast between brilliant sunshine and deep shadows in the woods, especially the beech woods of southern England. Picnics in the woods were a favourite form of relaxation, especially in the hot days of June and July. Bristol artists went to Leigh Woods, the other side of the river Avon from the city, to relax, read, play music and make sketches.
 
Danby’s friend, the artist Edward Villiers Rippingille wrote a letter to the poet John Clare, in the summer of 1824, which specifically mentions this contrast between deep shadow and brilliant sunlight in the woods. He encourages Clare to come and see the Bristol trees, water and woods in the sunshine: “see branches of the most luxuriant foliage hanging over the river as bright as a diamond forming the darkest recesses and hollows of the richest colours, the brown earth mixing with the endless varieties of greens produced from reflections and from the sun shining through broad sheets of leaves …” 
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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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