PROFESSOR CHRISTIANA PAYNE
  • News and Events
  • Blog

Trees IN 19th-century British art

The role of trees in British landscape painting, 1760-1870

GIVING BIRTH IN A TREE

8/30/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
This is Strutt's plate of the Crawley Elm, which, he says, grows in the middle of the village, providing “an inexhaustible source of pleasure to the train of village children who cluster like bees around it; trying their infant strength and courage in climbing its mimic precipices, while their parents recall, in their pastimes, the feelings of their own childhood; when, like them, they disported under the same boughs.”

A less rose-tinted view of the Crawley Elm was provided in another book on trees, Henry Phillips’ Sylva Florifera, published in 1823.  He says that a poor woman once gave birth in this tree, and lived there for a long time, but that it is now kept locked up to prevent such infants becoming a burden on the local poor-rates:

… as the parish is not willing to be burthened with all the young elms which might have been brought forth from the trunk of this singular tree, the lord of the manor has very wisely put up a door at the entrance of this lying-in hospital, and which is kept locked, except upon particular occasions, when the neighbours meet to enjoy their pipe, and tell old tales in the cavity of this elm, that  is capable of containing a party of more than a dozen.

Strutt makes no mention of the locked door or the story of the poor woman giving birth, details which rather undermine the impression of bucolic harmony and happiness given by his more or less contemporary account of the Crawley Elm. 




0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    For the last five years, I have been 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've been looking at drawing manuals, illustrated books on trees, oil paintings, watercolours and prints, landscape gardening, poetry, artists' writings. The artists I'm particularly interested in include 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. 

    Archives

    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.