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 I: BEECH

10/15/2016

1 Comment

 
Picture
​Paul Sandby, An Ancient Beech Tree, 1794. Bodycolour. Victoria and Albert Museum.
 
British artists have long been fascinated by trees. It goes without saying that trees are important in landscape painting, but some artists are satisfied with a generic tree: a trunk and branches, some rough brushstrokes for foliage, enough to suggest the idea of a tree without bothering to define it as oak, or ash, or beech. But in the years around 1800 many books were published on the characters of trees – that is, on the different species. Writers argued over the respective aesthetic merits of different trees: was the oak the most beautiful tree? Or the beech? Was the horse chestnut in flower a fine, or a disagreeable sight?
 
The eighteenth-century watercolourist Paul Sandby painted many types of trees, but his favourite was surely the beech, the most common tree in the woodlands of southern England. In the 1760s he was given a commission, to paint a series of watercolours of the trees in Luton Park, Bedfordshire.  Now part of the Luton Hoo Hotel, it still has a magnificent beech-lined drive.  Sandby went on painting beech trees all his life. His Ancient Beech Tree is a large painting in watercolour and bodycolour, in a gold frame. The painting is a portrait of a specific tree: its strong personality dominates the composition, and it dwarfs the human beings and animals around its base.
 
You can see that Sandby loved drawing the muscular branches that reach out in all directions like arms, twisting and turning as if in movement, the exposed roots that cling to the ground, and the feathery foliage that leaves the trunk and branches exposed. Because of its smooth bark, drawing a beech tree is perhaps the closest analogy, in the tree world, to drawing the human figure.
1 Comment
René Levaque
4/5/2017 03:20:45 am

Dear Christiana, the Paul Sandby BeachTree has reminded me of a watercolor showing detailed mallows beside a marvelous big tree that I purchased with an attribution to Paul Sandby. You might be interested to have a picture sent, accompanied with another wonderful watercolor showing a 'Ruisdal'-inspired tree. In all eventualities, I wish you the very best success with your new book,

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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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