PROFESSOR CHRISTIANA PAYNE
  • News and Events
  • Blog

Trees IN 19th-century British AND AMERICAN art

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

ARTISTS AND THEIR FAVOURITE TREES 6: TURNER AND THE STONE PINE

12/12/2016

1 Comment

 
Picture
​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. 
1 Comment
michiel schepers link
8/15/2019 12:50:51 am

dear Christiana Payne
nice to read your comments on Turner's lukewarm interest in trees. The stone pine I googled because I just had a go at them myself, in Pisa, and have long known Ruskin's great drawings of them, and just found a few drawings by Johann Scheffer von Leonhartshoff (in Deutche Romantische Handzeichnungen) to encourage me. (For as striking as they are, they do not automatically make a great picture!) My interest was in the coastal pine forests as a whole, the interlocking 'clouds on stilts'. The drawing is still in progress..
Hope you will end up making a book about trees in art, as there are few that survey this great subject.
I am a painter with a specialization in trees and (old-growth) forest, I travel widely to draw the best specimen from life and then turn them in to pictures in the studio. I am based in The Netherlands.
Would be delighted to communicate about this wonderful topic.
best regards
Michael Schepers

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    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. 

    Archives

    December 2021
    December 2020
    August 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    April 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2015
    December 2014
    August 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.