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

ARTSTS AND THEIR FAVOURITE TREES 5: EDWARD LEAR AND THE OLIVE TREE

12/3/2016

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Picture
​Edward Lear, Corfu from Ascension, c. 1860. Yale Center for British Art
​Edward Lear was the first British artist to give proper attention to olive trees. We have no difficulty finding olive trees beautiful today, but in the eighteenth century an artist visitor to Tivoli, Thomas Jones, thought them “thin & stragling” and only good for distances. Edward Lear saw his first olive trees at Lecco, on his way to Rome, and wrote to his sister Ann “I think them very beautiful, more like a huge lavender bush, or a fine grey willow than anything else, and all over green olives.” When he made drawings of Tivoli, he placed the olive trees in the foreground, lavishing attention on their twisting trunks and branches, with the villa at Tivoli and its famous waterfalls visible only in the distance, in a gap between the trees.
 
Lear also travelled extensively in Greece and Albania, and his favourite place was Corfu, of which he wrote “The extreme gardeny verdure – the fine olives, cypresses, almonds, and oranges, make the landscape so rich.”  Lear preferred the countryside, where the trees grew in a semi-wild state, to the formal gardens that had impressed his eighteenth-century predecessors, and he also seems to have had a fondness for trees useful to mankind, such as fruit or nut trees.
 
Later in life, on seeing Corfu again, he made this note in his diary: “the loved olive … No wonder the Olive is undrawn – unknown: so inaccessible = poetical = difficult are its belongings.”  In an oil painting, Corfu From Ascension he juxtaposes an olive grove with snow-capped mountains in the distance and ruins in the foreground. There are some goats near the ruins, but the olive trees seem even more alive than the animals, their trunks swaying like the movements of graceful dancers.
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    Author

    From 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".

    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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