Lunch in a hollow tree

8/27/2014

I'm fascinated by all these 18th and 19th-century accounts of people having parties inside hollow trees. Here is Gilbert Burnett, writing in the folio edition of Burgess's Eidodendron about an occasion in the King’s Oak in Windsor Forest:

We lunched in it September 22nd, 1829: it would accommodate at least twenty persons with standing room, and ten or a dozen might sit down comfortably to dinner. I think at Willis’s and in Guildhall I have danced a quadrille on a smaller space.

I imagine all these gents in their smart clothes and I wonder: didn't they get dirty? wasn't it dark and claustrophobic inside the tree?

I have yet to visit a tree that felt at all like a possible venue for lunch or dinner, but perhaps I will feel differently when I have seen the Bowthorpe oak.

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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.

Trees IN 19th-century British art

Lunch in a hollow tree

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