Trees are prominent features of every continent apart from Antarctica, and even our more densely urban areas find room for a few of them. From our origins in East Africa to the city parks of New York, London and Tokyo, humans and trees have lived together. As a result, trees feature in a great many paintings. This series explores how they have been depicted in European and North American art from before the Renaissance to the early twentieth century.

Like many artists since, Peter Paul Rubens made studies of trees to support his studio paintings in oils. This one, known simply as Landscape, is a careful and quite detailed sketch in gouache (opaque watercolour) of a group of trees on the bank of a small river, painted during the last five years of his life. The evidence from the tree in the mid-right is that he constructed them anatomically, by putting in the structural curves and lines of the branches, then laying down areas of foliage, a method developed during the Renaissance and still widespread today.

This practice of painting studies from life was recommended by the great landscape artist and teacher Pierre Henri Valenciennes (1750-1819), who wrote in his book Elements of Practical Perspective for the Use of Artists:
“Be sure to make several painted studies of beautiful trees, whether standing alone or in groups. Pay close attention to every detail of the bark, moss, roots, branches, and the ivy that surrounds and clings to them; above all, make good choices and study the variety of wood, bark, and foliage, which is of the utmost importance.” (Second edition, 1820.)

Landscape specialists like John Constable painted studies of trees throughout their career, to inform finished works.

He learned to create plein air sketches in oils, which he used extensively for ‘skying’ particularly around Hampstead Heath near London, and for remarkable studies of trees, such as this ash, seen in its autumn colours. Here he too has taken the time to construct the tree anatomically, and to detail its foliage.

This continued through the middle of the nineteenth century, when landscape painting was evolving towards Impressionism.

Camille Corot’s The Toutain Farm, Honfleur from about 1845 appears to be a finished studio painting, perhaps intended for the Salon. Its trees are marvellous and all but obscure and upstage the farmhouse beyond. Their sinuous limbs reflect his structured approach to painting their canopies with a catalogue of ways the trunk can give rise to branches. The canopy itself is shown in careful detail, although at the upper left it seems more vague and sketchy.

Europe has a rich and varied flora of tree species, and one of the challenges in painting its landscapes has been to capture their distinctive characteristics.

Jacob van Ruisdael gave insight into the stages in the life and looks of oak trees. In Road through an Oak Forest (c 1646-7) he captures the later life of a stag-headed oak on the left, which lost its crown long ago, a flush of new growth on a fallen trunk, and another still clinging onto life despite a great split at its base. Judging by the girth of their trunks, the oaks shown here are around 400 years old, making it likely they were saplings in the thirteenth century, possibly even earlier. They form a remarkable window in time back to the late Middle Ages.

Camille Pissarro’s Big Walnut Tree in Spring, Éragny from 1894 celebrates a species that is a source of binder in oil paint, in walnut oil, although it’s used far less frequently than linseed. Its wood is also sought after, making this tree a long-term investment for the landowner’s heirs.

Vincent van Gogh’s Cypresses (1889) are some of the best-remembered of all. As he moved style on beyond Impressionism, his swirling brushstrokes form solid but thoroughly living trees. These are most probably Italian cypresses, which are characteristic of the landscape around the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum where he was living at that time, and throughout Provence.

In his Olive Grove (1889), those swirling strokes of foliage complement the tortuous curves of the branches and gnarled blue-grey trunks.

Paul Cézanne’s oil paintings of trees, although abundant, show his emphasis on patterned brushstrokes in what is known as his constructive stroke. This isn’t true of his watercolours, as shown in Almond Trees in Provence (1900), where each tree rises in a flare of brilliant colours.

Cézanne’s constructive stroke became more prominent and started to dominate the structure of his oil paintings after 1890. In Large Pine and Red Earth (1890–5) it’s used throughout the foreground foliage and vegetation, and has even started to appear in some patches on the trunk.

Finally, Théo van Rysselberghe’s Pine by the Mediterranean Sea (1916) appears almost as substantial as the bleached rocks below it. Contrast between the lit segments and those in cast shadow behind is wide, as is seen on the shores of the Mediterranean.

I hope you will join me in exploring these and many other fine portraits of trees over the coming weeks.

Of all the artists of the late nineteenth century, Paul Cézanne presents the greatest challenges over his depictions of reflections on water. From the earliest of his surviving paintings, he painted many landscapes featuring reflections, but few are faithful to optical principles.

Landscape on the Banks of the Oise is an Impressionist view from Cézanne’s first campaign along the River Oise in 1873, when he painted in company with Pissarro, and shows the northern bank near the hamlet of Valhermeil.

Although reflections only appear in a narrow band at the foot of the picture, those of the house with a red roof are particularly prominent, and visibly out of alignment with the original. The measured lateral displacement in the reflected image of that house ranges from 27 to 39 mm, depending on which part of the house is assessed. Those represent 2.9% to 4.2% of the total width of the canvas. All those displacements seen are of the reflection to the right of the position expected according to optical principles.

Although the view shown doesn’t make it clear, at this point even in Cézanne’s day the River Oise wasn’t just a few metres wide, but was and remains a wide, navigable waterway. While it’s not impossible that Cézanne painted this view from a boat moored close to the northern shore, there are no records to even suggest that he or Pissarro might have done so.

It’s thus most probable that Cézanne painted this from the southern bank of the Oise, at least 70 m away from the depicted reflections. Measurements made from recent satellite imagery and compared with maps of the time show that the house with the red roof was approximately 70 m and no less than 50 m from the water’s edge. Assuming the bank on which Cézanne placed his easel was about 3 m above water level, and his eye was about 1.5 m above that, basic trigonometry shows that the red roof of the house should also have been about 4.5 m above water level, which wouldn’t be compatible with the view as depicted.

Further analysis shows that the reflections cannot have been painted faithfully from nature, but must have been copied from elsewhere or constructed from Cézanne’s imagination, possibly at a later time when no longer in front of the motif. It’s hard to explain all the anomalies seen, particularly as this was at a time when Cézanne was often painting in company with Pissarro, whose long career included paintings depicting complex reflections that adhere to optical principles.

In this painting, a view Cézanne must have seen almost every day he went out from his family home of Jas de Bouffan, there are multiple discrepancies between the original and reflected areas, and evidence of pentimenti in the right side of the reflection.

Looking over the pool, the painting’s midline is marked by a tree, behind which are various buildings. At the left, closest to the viewer, branches of an evergreen tree are seen in front of the nearest large building. From that a series of smaller sheds track across the middle of the painting, culminating in a wall. Behind those are a farmhouse, and a sloping field with light brown and green stripes.

The reflections shown bear little resemblance to the rest of the painting, with disparities obvious in every object seen in the reflections, and apparently large areas of pentimenti on the right side of the reflections, as shown below.

One potential explanation is that Cézanne tried using a technique sometimes recommended for painting reflections, rotating the canvas by 180˚, and inadvertently as a result painted the reflection of the farmhouse on the wrong side of the pool. On restoring the orientation of the canvas, he then tried to correct the reflection, but didn’t complete its detail. However this doesn’t explain why he painted the distant farmhouse in reflection in the first place.

Bords de la Marne I (1888-94) is the second in a series, again showing large lateral displacements in its reflections, as seen in the composite detail below.

There are also differences in the depth order of the trees and house. In the original image, there is a prominent poplar behind the tower, which appears at the front left of the tower in reflection. The two prominent poplars behind the original image of the main house (in line with its gable) are also shown in the reflection as being in front of the house.

L’aqueduc et l’écluse (1894, or 1895-8) shows a view that has structural similarities to that of Cézanne’s earlier Villa au bord de l’eau (1890), but here appears totally different.

Most distant in Cézanne’s L’aqueduc et l’écluse is a building over two arches, reaching out from the right to the middle of the painting. To the left of it are two low buttresses with a horizontal piece bridging them. In front are two higher buttresses that appear unconnected with other structures. Closest to the viewer is a bridge arching over the water, its pier at the right edge of the canvas.

To each side of the view are high trees, rendered using rectangular patches of colour, each composed of a series of brushstrokes mainly laid diagonally in his ‘constructive stroke’. Discrepancies are clear in the composite view below.

All the buttresses, piers, and arches are vertically exaggerated in their reflections, and most lean noticeably in the opposite direction to the originals. The leftmost buttress appears quite different in its reflection as compared with the original, its reflection being as high as the pair of isolated buttresses in front, despite its original image reaching to only about two-thirds of their height. In the reflection immediately to the right of that leftmost buttress can be seen evidence of an arch, perhaps part of pentimenti there, which doesn’t correspond to anything in the original, except perhaps the shallow, flat bridge.

Reflections shown for the two isolated buttresses in the middle of the painting start at their foot, although this also appears to be part of the bank rather than water. Similarly reflections of the arches of the building start on the bank and not the water, and those arches aren’t truncated in height to allow for their distance back from the water’s edge. The arches themselves aren’t shown from the low view expected in a reflection: more is seen of the underside of the top of each arch in the original than in its reflection. Not only the arch of the bridge but its right pier are either not shown in the reflection at all, or appear with distorted form and colour.

Thus the reflections shown capture the rhythmic structure of the piers and buttresses, but their forms are so idiosyncratic as to cast doubt as to whether they are reflections on water at all. Even if this painting is far from complete, its reflections make it one of Cézanne’s most enigmatic.

This is one of Cézanne’s best-known paintings, which has been reproduced and discussed extensively. It shows a view across Lake Annecy from Talloires, featuring the distinctive Château de Duingt and the foothills rising behind it. The water surface is shown to cover almost the entire lower half of the painting, within which the reflections of the castle are central and dominant features.

Comparison with views of the actual motif reveals that Cézanne has brought the far shore considerably closer to the viewer than it really is, by enlarging all the objects on that shore. House (2008) states that the château is about one mile away from Cézanne’s viewpoint, but measurement on modern satellite images shows the distance to be 0.76 km or just under half a mile.

As revealed in the composite image above, immediately to the right of the tree trunk shown marking most of the left in repoussoir, the water surface is depicted as being pale blue, with two light vertical marks which should represent reflections, although the area being reflected is shown much darker in the original image and lacks any object corresponding to the vertical marks.

Moving right across the reflection, there should then be a green area to match the original greenery shown on the left of the château, but the water surface there remains a mid blue. Although the original image of the castle closely resembles photographs, the reflection shown appears to be that of a quite different object, consisting of two tall, slightly slanting, pale cylinders, neither of which is aligned with the edge or tower shown.

Recognising these remarkably distorted reflections, the late Professor John House (2008) commented on them, writing “The reflections in the water are slightly distorted – like the table legs in The Card Players, they are not exactly vertical; and the water surface is implausibly still; Cézanne took no interest in the specific play of reflections that played so central a part in the art of Claude Monet, whose work he nevertheless greatly admired.”

Maison au bord de l’eau (1900-4) is a late watercolour showing a house surrounded by tall poplar trees, fronting onto a body of water. There are large areas of white ‘reserved’ space and relatively few reflections, but the crisp geometric depiction of the house and its reflection enable assessment of those details shown in the composite view below.

In the original image, the front of the house roof is shown to have a single broadened gable at its apex, but the reflection omits the horizontal section at that gable. As a result the left side of the reflection of the house is markedly asymmetric from the original. This is exacerbated by displacement of the apex of the reflected roof to the right, which in turn makes the reflected roof appear less high than the original.

Possibly recognising the difficulties and asymmetry that had arisen, the left side of the roof reflection is left incomplete, the pencil line indicating its position stopping level with the end of the reflection of the left side of the sloping roof, where it’s clearly too close to the bank. The single poplar tree shown in reflection is also visibly displaced to the right.

I have yet to see any account of Cézanne’s paintings of reflections that is consistent with these images.

References

Reflections in art:
3 – Cézanne’s conundrums
4 – Cézanne has more problems
5 – Explaining Cézanne’s discrepancies

Arrouye J (2011) “L’eau, miroir de la peinture”, pp 154-161 in D Coutagne Cézanne et Paris, Rmn-Grand Palais, Paris. Translated as “Water the mirror of painting”, pp 154-161 in D Coutagne Cézanne and Paris, Rmn-Grand Palais, Paris.
Coutagne D (2006) “The Jas de Bouffan”, pp 76-121 in P Conisbee and D Coutagne Cézanne in Provence, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Coutagne D (2011) P. Cézanne à Paris et en Île-de-France, Éditions Crès.
House J (2008) “Le Lac d’Annecy”, pp 102-105 in S Buck et al. The Courtauld Cézannes, Paul Holberton Publishing, London
Machotka P (2008) Cézanne, the Eye and the Mind, Éditions Crès, Marseille.

Of all the painting media, oils give the artist greatest flexibility to change their mind. Even when relatively ‘dry’, they can be scraped back carefully and overpainted, although in many cases overpainting is all that’s required. When such changes are detected by the viewer, they’re often referred to as a pentimento, appropriately the Italian for repentance, with pentimenti in the plural.

Written accounts of artists’ practices and careful examination of their paintings can reveal much about their methods. Some undertake such extensive preparations that painting the finished work invariably goes according to plan. Others may rework their composition extensively as it develops, and leave copious evidence of how they changed their mind.

Several of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings show how he changed his mind as he worked on the finished painting. His Madonna with a Flower, popularly known as the Benois Madonna, is thought to date from 1481-83, and was preceded in the years 1475-80 by numerous sketches and studies of the Madonna, including several that are strongly linked with this composition. Nevertheless, examination of this painting reveals many pentimenti: the infant’s head was originally larger, and the grasses held by the Madonna in her left hand were originally flowers. Those aren’t visible in this image, though.

Pentimenti can be revealed using special techniques, including infra-red reflectography.

There’s no readily visible evidence that Lucas Cranach the Elder made changes during his painting of The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine in 1504-5.

Cranach had a reputation for being quite an impulsive and rapid painter, which seems to be borne out by more thorough analysis. His early works, in particular, show evidence of repeated adjustments in form and colour. The infra-red reflectogram of the Martyrdom of Saint Catherine, below, shows how he laid down the figures in detail in the underdrawing, but extemporised the pyrotechnic effects.

Considerable changes were made to the details during the painting process, as seen here in the underdrawing of the executioner, and the figures to the right of his head.

Sometimes the ageing of a painting brings pentimenti to light, although they wouldn’t have been visible at the time they were completed.

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg’s Ulysses’ Revenge on Penelope’s Suitors from 1814 shows Odysseus and Telemachus at the left as they attack a small group of the suitors. There are abundant pentimenti visible now in the background, suggesting the artist changed his composition quite radically.

In more modern paintings it can be difficult to distinguish pentimenti from what the artist intended. There are many examples of this in the oil paintings of Paul Cézanne.

Landscape on the Banks of the Oise is an Impressionist view from Cézanne’s first campaign along the River Oise, when he painted in company with Pissarro, and shows the northern bank near the hamlet of Valhermeil.

Closer examination of the reflected image of the house with the red roof merits further study of the painting. Cézanne appears to have made pentimenti to its left edge, at least, and possibly at its right edge too. It appears that an earlier attempt to paint the red roof may have shown it extending more to the left, where it would have been displaced less than now appears.

These can be seen more clearly in the composite image above, in which I have moved the reflected image to the left so that it does align ‘correctly’ with the real image.

In this painting of The Pond of the Jas de Bouffan in Winter, a view Cézanne must have seen almost every day that he went out from his family home, there is evidence of pentimenti in the right side of the reflected image.

Other media are less forgiving. Watercolours can sometimes cope with small changes, but all too often fail completely. Scraping back isn’t normally possible with acrylics, which tend to be overpainted without scraping, as the latter strips the entire paint layer and may also damage the ground.