Once a cereal crop had been harvested and gathered for threshing, the fields might then be scavenged for any remaining grain, a process known as gleaning. Although this has been described since Old Testament times, there’s uncertainty as to who gleaned, and where they were able to glean. This article shows a selection of paintings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showing gleaning, to see if they cast further light on those questions.

Biblical accounts establish that gleaning was then a means for the poorest in society to acquire their own free supply of grain, and was a right of the poor. Some assume that the same practice continued, under the same right, until it fell into disuse in the late twentieth century. That ignores complex changes in land ownership and rights, and national law, and makes assumptions about rural economies that may not be correct.

The majority of those living in the country between 1500 and 1800 had little need for money. Almost everything they required in life was grown or made locally, and there were few if any consumer goods that they would need to purchase. Most lived in two sets of clothes: working dress, which was handed down, patched and repaired until it was unwearable, and a Sunday outfit worn when attending church, similarly inherited. Furniture was scant, made from local wood, and handed down through generations. Food and other goods that the family couldn’t supply itself would normally be obtained by barter with a neighbour. While those with more land and animals could sell them at market, and use the proceeds to buy luxuries, that remained out of the reach of the majority. It appears to have been that majority who gleaned the fields after harvest.

Although some countries in Europe retained gleaning rights on the strength of Biblical law, as land was enclosed and brought into increasingly complex systems of private ownership and rights, some land owners challenged that ancient right, and in 1788 a notable English legal case set the precedent that there was no universal right to glean, no matter how poor you might be. Nevertheless, many landowners continued to allow gleaning on their land, and in some areas these were celebrated alongside the harvest itself. Gleaning, like much else in the country, thus varied from country to country, and by region and village, but wasn’t confined to the poorest by any means.

One pitfall in looking at paintings of gleaning is that some are retelling the Biblical story of Ruth and Boaz, rather than depicting contemporary gleaning.

In Samuel Palmer’s The Gleaning Field (c 1833), as in other accounts, gleaners appear to have been mostly women.

In 1854, Jules Breton returned to live in his home village of Courrières, not far from Calais in north-east France, and started painting agricultural workers in the local landscape. His style changed dramatically, and the following year he enjoyed success with his first masterpiece, The Gleaners (1854), which won him a third-class medal at the 1855 Paris Salon. Overseeing this gleaning is the garde champêtre or village policeman, an older man distinguished by his official hat and armband, who was probably an army veteran. In the background, behind the grainstacks that were later to be such popular motifs for the Impressionists, is the village church tower, surrounded by its houses.

Breton had started to plan this painting soon after his return. He made a series of studies, several of which survive, for its figures, but the view appears to be faithful to reality. The figure of the young woman walking across the view from the right (in front of the garde champêtre) seems to have been modelled on the daughter of Breton’s first art teacher, whom the artist married in 1858.

Jean-François Millet’s hope for the Salon two years later was his substantial painting of The Gleaners (1857), which is completely different in concept. The distant wagon, grainstacks, and village may appear common elements, as are the three women bent over to glean in the foreground, but that is as far as the similarities go.

Millet’s composition is sparse, concentrating on those three figures. There are no distractions, such as the garde champêtre to add colour or humour: it’s all about poverty, and smacked of socialism; unlike Breton’s painting it got the thumbs-down from both the rich and the middle classes who frequented the Salon. Millet had also been born and brought up in the country, in his case further west on the north coast of France, in the Normandy village of Gruchy, where he had worked on the land.

Breton’s Calling in the Gleaners (also known as The Recall of the Gleaners, Artois) (1859) is one of the treasures of the Musée d’Orsay. With the light now fading, and the first thin crescent of the waxing moon in the sky, the loose flock of weary women and children make their way back home with their hard-won wheat. At the far left, the garde champêtre calls the last in, so that he can go home for the night. Behind them a flock of sheep is grazing on the adjacent pasture.

Painted in 1880, Eugène Burnand’s Gleaners are set in high Alpine meadows, two girls with meagre gleanings. They are dressed in plain working clothes, but don’t appear particularly poor. Behind them a cart carries away the main harvest.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s most enduring expression of rural poverty was in showing four women salvaging the remains left in the fields after the harvest: the Gleaners, here his version of 1887. Lhermitte was another son of the country, this time Mont-Saint-Père in Picardy, inland in north-east France, although his father was a schoolteacher.

Cowed from 1887 shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest in Denmark, but there’s much more to Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s story than that. The owner of the large farm in the left distance has gathered in their grain, and their harvesters have been paid off for their effort. Then out come the gleaners to scavenge what they can from the fields.

The family group in front of us consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground.

The daughter is finely dressed under her coarse gleaning apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone in service as a maid, or similar, in a rich household in the nearby town. She looks anxious and flushed, and is almost certainly an unmarried mother, abandoned by her young child’s father, and it’s surely she who is oppressed or ‘cowed’. Their difficult family discussion is being watched by another young woman at the far left, who might be a younger sister, perhaps.

Brendekilde took his name from the small village of Brændekilde, near Odense on the island of Funen in Denmark. The son of a clog maker, he lived with his grandparents for several years when a child, and at the age of ten made his living as a shepherd.

The Impressionists seldom seem to have painted controversial social issues. One of the few exceptions to this proved a lesson for Camille Pissarro in the practicality of Divisionism. He started work on his intensely sensory and idyllic painting The Gleaners in early 1888, using a squared-up study in gouache to finalise his composition. He found the painting hard, and wrote that he needed models so that he could complete its detail, which did the following year.

As Europe moved into the twentieth century, gleaning became increasingly unreal and romantic.

Gleaners were still commonplace in the Essex grain fields at harvest time, trying to scrape enough waste grain from the ground to feed their families. In Sir George Clausen’s Gleaners Coming Home from 1904, swirling brushstrokes make the gleaners’ improbably smart clothes appear to move as they walk home in the evening sunlight.

Clausen’s The Gleaners Returning (1908) is a marvellous contre-jour (into the light) view, again with swirling brushstrokes imparting movement in the women’s clothes, and no hint of their poverty.

Lhermitte’s Gleaners Near Haystacks (1912) shows a group of women gleaning, two of them almost bent double.

Even when he was well into his seventies, Lhermitte seemed able to find time and energy for just another painting of gleaners, in his Gleaning Women of 1920.

With the increasing depopulation of Europe’s rural areas and the introduction of mechanical methods of harvesting, gleaning seems to have died out by the middle of the twentieth century, only to reappear around 2000. It’s now an organised voluntary activity arranged with farmers, to recover crops unsuitable for mechanical harvesting, and other recoverable sources.

As with many other aspects of rural life, gleaning appears to have varied according to era and location. In some areas it seems to have been confined to those who were struggling to provide sufficient food for themselves, in the Biblical tradition. In others it was more general, and a normal phase of the harvest supplying most families with a free top-up of grain they could get ground by a miller to add to their supply of bread in the coming winter. It could also yield substantial amounts of grain: one report claims a widow and her three sons gleaned 325 kg (720 pounds) of wheat from one harvest. After all, if left in the field where it was, it would only have been ploughed back into the ground later in the autumn, and gone to waste.

Reference

David Hoseason Morgan (1982) Harvesters and Harvesting 1840-1900, Routledge ISBN 978 1 138 74476 9.

The climax of the year in arable farming is the harvest, when the sustained labour of the previous year pays off. For the farmer, this is the return on that investment, and for the labourers it’s when they hope to get paid their bonus. It’s the one time of the year when everyone turns to and works from before dawn until well after dusk in a united effort to harvest the ripe crop, before the weather breaks and it might be ruined.

The harvest depends on the crop being grown; as cereals, particularly wheat, were the most important across much of Europe, I’ll here concentrate on the processes required to turn them from ripe plants to grain ready for the miller to grind into flour. This article looks at the first step in that, cutting the crop, bundling it into sheaves and stacking those in stooks.

Current accounts of the grain harvest distinguish several tools used to cut the crop:

• handheld sickle, lightweight and normally with a serrated blade,
• handheld reaping hook, lightweight and with a smooth blade,
• handheld bagging or fagging hook, heavier and with a smooth blade, used in conjunction with a hooked stick or metal pick thank,
• long-handled scythe, heavy and held with both hands, with a smooth blade.

Some claim that reaping using a handheld sickle or hook was used for wheat and rye, but that barley and oats were more usually mown with a larger scythe. Although that doesn’t appear to be accurate, it’s clear that the use of scythes was considerably more efficient. While it took about 4 worker-days to cut an acre of grain using a sickle or hook, using a scythe typically took only 2 worker-days per acre. Scythes appear to have been used almost exclusively by men, while sickles and hooks were used by both men and women.

The tool used also determined the length of straw stalk cut with the head of grain, thus the height of the stubble left on the field. Sickles and hooks were often used when less straw was required, leaving high stubble that might be mown with a scythe later. Low reaping or bagging, or mowing with a scythe, created longer straw that was suitable for thatching.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 shows men cutting a crop of wheat close to the base of the stem using scythes, leaving short stubble. This ensures the best yield of straw as well as grain.

Behind these workers eating bread baked from flour ground from cereal grown in the same fields, cut cereal is tied first into sheaves before they’re gathered into stooks.

Anne Vallayer-Coster’s Garden Still Life, with Implements, Vegetables, Dead Game, and a Bust of Ceres (The Attributes of Hunting and Gardening) from 1774 shows at its left edge a long-handled scythe, and at the right a sickle or reaping hook. Scythes were also used extensively for mowing hay and weeds.

In about 1833, when Samuel Palmer painted his wonderful Harvest Moon near Shoreham in Kent, harvesting went on well into the night. These are mostly women wielding sickles or reaping hooks to cut a small field of wheat. The cut stalks are then formed into stooks and piled onto the oxcart for transport to nearby farm buildings.

Palmer’s mentor John Linnell painted The Harvest Cradle twenty-five years later, in 1859. The harvesters have their backs to the viewer, but appear to be using scythes to cut this wheat crop. Bundles of cut grain are tied as sheaves, then assembled into stooks in the foreground.

Jean-François Millet’s Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 is unusual in that the goddess is shown holding a sickle with a serrated edge, and is surrounded by sheaves of wheat.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s famous Harvesters’ Pay from 1882 shows four harvesters, bearing their heavy-duty scythes, as they await payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose. In the right foreground are two tied sheaves of cut wheat, with a lightweight sickle resting on them.

During the nineteenth century some attached cradles to the blade, to make sheaving easier. This is shown in Laurits Andersen Ring’s painting of Harvest. The crop being cut here may well be rye rather than wheat. The artist got his brother to model for this “monument to the Danish peasant” during the summer of 1885, while working on his farm near Fakse, on Sjælland (Zealand), Denmark.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine from 1880 shows wheat being cut on the steppe, with the worker in the foreground carrying a scythe, but those cutting in the middle distance bent over as if using hooks instead.

The young woman in Mykola Pymonenko’s portrait of a Reaper from 1889 has been cutting what could be rye or wheat using a heavier bagging hook, although she isn’t using the hooked stick normally required for the technique, so could be using it as a regular reaping hook. The woman behind her demonstrates that these harvesters are cutting low to keep a good length of straw on the harvested crop.

Anna Ancher, wife of Danish painter Michael Ancher, caught this procession of Harvesters on their way to their work in 1905, near her home in Skagen on the north tip of Jylland (Jutland). The leader carries his scythe high as they pass through ripe wheat.

Finally, conventional corn stooks were by no means universal across Europe.

By tradition on Norwegian farms, cut corn (cereal) wasn’t left to dry in low stooks, as in most of Europe and America, but built onto poles. In a series of paintings and prints, Nikolai Astrup developed these Corn Stooks (1920) into ghostly armies standing on parade in the fields, the rugged hills behind only enhancing the feeling of strangeness.

These paintings suggest that, between 1550 and 1890, wheat was generally cut using scythes when suitable men were available. Otherwise, it would be cut using a hook, most likely for reaping rather than bagging. Wheat was normally cut low to preserve the stalk as straw suitable for thatching, then tied into sheaves before being stacked into stooks.

That left the fields ready for gleaning.

As we near the end of this alphabet of landscape painting, this week we reach the letter y, standing for yellow, one of the most important and versatile colours in the artist’s palette. It’s most strongly associated with late summer, when much of the countryside has become dry and turned from the green of Spring to the yellows of ripened grain, ready for harvest.

Perhaps the earliest complete visual reference to the grain harvest is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters from 1565. This shows each step in the traditional and labour-intensive processes of cutting the ripe crop, gathering it into stooks, transporting it by cart for threshing, and onward transfer of grain to the waiting ships in the far distance.

In 1826, the young British painter Samuel Palmer moved to the rural village of Shoreham in Kent, in the valley of the River Darent to the north of Sevenoaks, where he spent much of the next decade producing some of his most distinctive work. For Palmer, the village and its environs became his ‘land of milk and honey’, in a Biblical vision of Beulah. His finely-detailed Oak Trees, Lullingstone Park was painted two years later, in 1828. This shows ancient oaks in the deer park of Lullingstone Castle, in the Darent Valley of Kent, between Eynsford and Shoreham, with their leaves turned yellow in the early autumn.

Towards the end of his time in Shoreham, Palmer’s views started to open out into more conventional landscapes, such as The Golden Valley (c 1833-34), caught here at the end of the harvest.

Painted three centuries after Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s encyclopaedic account, Charles-François Daubigny’s Harvest from 1851 is remarkably similar, although its yellows are more muted.

Further afield, in the vast cereal-growing lands of Ukraine, Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine (1880) shows laborious hand-cutting of grain on the steppe, and demonstrates the origin of the Ukrainian flag of blue and yellow.

Mykola Pymonenko’s classic view of Harvest in Ukraine from 1896 follows a compositional formula developed by Jules Bastien-Lepage for Naturalist paintings. Its horizon is high, about three-quarters of the way up the canvas. The women in the foreground and the child’s cradle are painted in fine detail, and their edges are so crisp that they pop out. As the figures and fields recede into the background, they rapidly lose detail and their edges blur. The effect is of a vivid reality at the focus of the image, with deep recession to the distant horizon.

Camille Pissarro started work on his intensely sensory and idyllic painting The Gleaners in early 1888, using a squared-up study in gouache to finalise his composition. He found the Divisionist technique hard, and wrote that he needed models so that he could complete its detail, which he did later the following year.

British painter Adrian Stokes travelled to Romania in eastern Europe for this golden view of Harvest Time in Transylvania (c 1909), one of many paintings he and his wife Marianne made of their protracted visits.

Grant Wood’s Fall Plowing from 1931 is set in the prairie of Iowa, where it shows ripe and harvested cereals, and a recently developed walking plough with a steel ploughshare, an important advance in cultivating the prairie.

Henry Herbert La Thangue painted In the Orchard in 1893, presumably in Sussex, England, using a profusion of fine marks more typical of Impressionism. Although the figures and baskets of fruit are quite tightly detailed, much of the rest of his canvas is more painterly and atmospheric.

Yellow has also been used in combination with blues and greens to create colours closer to those in nature. In some cases, even into the twentieth century, the yellow used hasn’t proved lightfast, and has faded to leave foliage appearing blue.

This is all too sadly evident in Adriaen van de Velde’s otherwise superb Vertumnus and Pomona from 1670.

Carl Blechen used lightfast chrome yellow extensively in his imposing View of Assisi, painted in 1832-35. By this time, the mixture of chrome yellow with Prussian blue had become known as green cinnabar or chrome green, although the chromium salt used was yellow in colour, not green.

Chrome yellow was widely used by the Impressionists and shown at the Salon, and is demonstrated well in Paul Cézanne’s famous painting of The Railway Cutting (c 1870). Most if not all of the greens seen here most probably rely on chrome yellow mixed with blue.

In this alphabet of landscape painting there are several strong contenders for the letter v. Volcanoes make for thrilling views, but are unusual apart from those of Vesuvius. Views of Venice, or vedute, have become a specialist sub-genre in their own right. I have therefore chosen the more general theme of valleys instead.

Two approaches have been popular to make the valley the theme of a landscape painting, depending on the viewpoint chosen. If the artist decides to paint from within the valley, then they will de-emphasise its surrounding uplands. If the chosen viewpoint is above the valley, then any surrounding hills will naturally appear distant and subsidiary.

JC Dahl’s Landscape in Kaupanger with a Stave Church from 1847 opts for the former technique, its hills made vague and shrouded in low cloud, and the valley in the foreground painted in higher chroma and greater detail. Dahl had to employ a little deception as this church had been modified structurally and looked quite different at the time, so substituted the stave church at Vang, which was demolished shortly afterwards. Dahl stepped in and had it rebuilt in the Silesian Mountains for the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV.

Frederic Edwin Church’s huge masterpiece The Heart of the Andes from 1859 adopts a similar strategy, with its brightly-coloured birds and rich plant life in the foreground valley. At its heart is a cross, with two figures by it (detail below). Dressed as locals, one sits, facing the cross, while the other stands just behind the seated figure, looking in the same direction. The cross is made simply of wood, and appears to have been decorated with a floral garland. It’s partly obscured by the luxuriant wayside plants.

Just four years later, Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863) focussed attention on the Shoshone in the foreground, while the rugged mountain of the title is faded into the far distance.

Although the staffage in the foreground of Sidney Richard Percy’s On the Road to Loch Turret, Crieff (1868) appears routine, he has put similar emphasis on this valley near the market town of Crieff, on the busy road between Perth and Crianlarich. Percy’s track is more remote, and probably used by Highland drovers to take their cattle to market in Crieff, then a major outlet for livestock from further north in Scotland.

Benjamin Williams Leader’s In a Welsh Valley from 1909 dissolves the peaks of Snowdonia, North Wales, in vagueness, while its green valley is supersaturated.

The alternative approach of looking down on the valley is compositionally simpler, but requires careful attention to depth and perspective to avoid the valley appearing flat.

Samuel Palmer painted this view of The Golden Valley when he was living in Shoreham between about 1833-34. This looks down from the Weald of Kent just as the harvest is being brought down to the valley below.

In the summer of 1853, the Pre-Raphaelite landscape artist Thomas Seddon visited Brittany, where he painted his first masterpiece of Léhon, from Mont Parnasse, Brittany. This shows the ruins of the monastery there, and has the distinctive look of Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings in combining fine detail with an air of unreality.

This look is in part the result of the prolonged painting time to achieve the fine detail expected. Early plein air painters quickly learned that capturing a view so that it appeared natural required fast work for short periods, only an hour or two at most, in consistent lighting conditions over one or a very few sessions at the same time each day. To accomplish that, they sketched, and omitted detail. By setting himself the requirement of capturing such great detail, true to nature, Seddon made the painting process so protracted as to lose the coherent details of light, shadow, and surface effects that make a realist painting appear real.

A November Rainbow – Dolwyddelan Valley, November 11, 1866, 1 p.m. (1866) is one of Alfred William Hunt’s most celebrated paintings, with its elaborate composition and rich colours. It shows the valley of the River Lledr near the hamlet of Bertheos, on the eastern side of the Snowdon range in North Wales. He too de-emphasises the distant hills and floods the valley with light and detail.

In 1885, Charles Blomfield painted the active geothermal area of Orakei Korako on the Waikato, with its geysers and hot springs. This is on the bank of New Zealand’s longest river, in the North Island, and views the valley from above.

My final example is this View from the Dürnstein Ruins over the Danube Valley painted from above by Emilie Mediz-Pelikan in about 1900. In the foreground are the ruins of Dürnstein Castle, near Krems, with the River Danube below, meandering tightly from the top. She has cropped out the hills that might have distracted from her superb view of the Danube Valley.

When landscape artists take to the hills, they often head for rocky peaks and miss the undulating uplands of the foothills. So u in this alphabet of landscapes stands for those undulating uplands that roll rather than precipitate. In English they’re often referred to as downs, which might appear contradictory, although the word has common origins with dunes, which makes more sense, perhaps.

Samuel Palmer’s view of The Weald of Kent from about 1833-34 is typical of what you see looking down from a ridge at the valley below. This is an area of low hills between the main South and North Downs in the south-east of England.

Although a bit more rugged than the Downs of England, Arnold Böcklin’s view In the Alban Hills from 1851 shows these hills about 20 km (12 miles) south-east of the city of Rome. These have long been a popular escape from the city during the hot months of summer.

Jean-François Millet returned to the rolling Normandy countryside of his birth in The Hamlet of Cousin near Gréville (1855). This shows the rough lane leading to another nearby hamlet, Cousin, amid rolling countryside with hedgerows enclosing tiny fields.

Benjamin Williams Leader found A Welsh Cornfield in 1862 with its cereal crop cut by hand into stooks ready for threshing. One of the women is using a ladder stile to traverse the field’s dry stone wall. There’s fine attention to detail, including appropriate native plants, in accordance with the principles of Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting.

Camille Pissarro’s Côte de Jalais, Pontoise (1867) shows the hill of Les Jalais at l’Hermitage, where Pissarro lived, viewed from the Chemin des Mathurins in Pontoise, north of Paris.

When Ivan Pokhitonov was living in Belgium in 1912, he painted this view of The Walloon Village of Jupille, catching its fruit trees in blossom.

In 1915 Eugène Burnand painted his last major work, Ploughing in the Jorat, but his first version was destroyed by fire. He completed this second version the following year. This wide-screen pastoral landscape contains a patchwork of villages and farmland between forested hills, near where the artist lived, to the north of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Paul Nash’s view of the Cotswold Hills, from about 1920, shows the rolling countryside near his family home in Buckinghamshire, England. These hills sprawl across a large tract of central western England, to the west of Oxford.

Grant Wood’s Spring Turning from 1936 is a high aerial view of rolling countryside in the American rural Midwest, being ploughed using a pair of horses, during the Spring. Its bright green fields seem almost endless.

Around 1939, shortly before the start of the Second World War, Eric Ravilious visited the famous White Horse cut in the chalk downs at Uffington in Berkshire, England. The Vale of the White Horse (c 1939) shows the view from an unconventionally low angle, in pouring rain. This hill figure is thought to date from the late Bronze or early Iron Age, around three millennia ago.

Percy Shakespeare’s painting of December on the Downs, Wartime, made during the Second World War, shows one of the rolling chalk downs in the south of England, with both tractors and teams of horses working the land.

In every continent except Antarctica, the letter t in this alphabet of landscape painting can only stand for trees, whether in distant forests, framing the painting in repoussoir, or the subject of a portrait. Because of their frequency and importance, this week’s subject extends to two articles.

The depiction of trees has long been a popular subject for instructional texts about painting. Without exception, at least until the twentieth century, these have taught an anatomical method, where the structure of the tree is built up from its trunk and branches before applying foliage. This is best learned by painting studies of trees in front of the motif, before transferring those to finished paintings in the studio.

Like many artists since, Peter Paul Rubens made studies of trees to support his studio paintings in oils. This, known simply as Landscape (c 1635-40), is a careful and detailed sketch in gouache of a group of trees on the bank of a small river. The evidence, from the tree in the mid-right, is that he constructed them anatomically, putting in the structural curves and lines of the branches, then laying down areas of foliage.

Back in the studio, Rubens used those studies to assemble larger paintings in oils, such as Evening Landscape with Timber Wagon (c 1630-40). They are still constructed using the anatomical method, and in some sections of foliage the underlying branches can be seen. Although they’re backlit and shown in the gathering dusk, he places gestural highlights on some trunks, and uses tonal range to give the foliage depth.

Many of Nicolas Poussin’s paintings employ foreground trees to frame the view in repoussoir, enhancing the sense of depth. His Landscape with Two Nymphs and a Snake from about 1659 is unusual in that the trees on the right are more than a framing device, and are established as an important part of the whole view.

Seen in this detail view, Poussin has varied the amount of detail shown in the foliage, as well as its tone and colour, to ensure that the trees don’t appear flat like a proscenium arch. Fine detail on the lower trunks gives them realistic texture, as an alternative to the highlights that would have been shown had they been in different light. This also shows evidence of Poussin’s use of the anatomical method.

Thomas Gainsborough was arguably more accomplished in his depictions of trees than he was of the portraits that earned him his living. His Wooded Landscape with a Cottage and Shepherd (1748-50) is dominated by a single tree, whose wonderfully gnarled and lichen-encrusted bark threatens to subsume the shepherd at its foot. Sadly, the tree’s rather thin foliage appears to have become more transparent over time. However, this does reveal the whole of its tortuous branch system, and demonstrates clearly his use of the anatomical method: each branch could have come from a textbook on the painting of trees.

John Constable was a great fan of Gainsborough’s trees and landscapes, and an avid plein air sketcher using both watercolours and oils. This Landscape at East Bergholt (c 1805) is a quick watercolour sketch, but he still took time and care to ensure that its trees, particularly the dominant one filling the right half of the paper, are carefully constructed on anatomical lines.

Constable’s finished studio paintings are inevitably richer in fine detail. The Vale of Dedham (1828) employs a similar compositional form to his East Bergholt sketch, although the trees and distant setting are different. Textural detail in the bark of the lower trunks is meticulous rather than gestural, and unlike Poussin, the level of detail in the foliage varies little. Constable’s more painterly style is seen in his oil studies, particularly the final full-size studies for his ‘six footers’, where it often appears more effective than his finished works.

As Constable was painting his later works, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was starting his career by becoming the most skilled plein air painter of his generation. Although his Ville-d’Avray: Entrance to the Wood (c 1825) was clearly painted at speed, and lacks Constable’s detail, it’s unlikely to have been completed in a single sitting.

Most of Corot’s landscapes feature trees, and his approach to them varies considerably. In this painting there’s an intermediate level of detail, sufficient for him to structure marks forming the leaves of the smaller tree in the right foreground, but the central and dominant tree has its foliage shown en masse.

A few years later, Samuel Palmer’s The Weald of Kent (c 1833-4) uses a tree to construct deep repoussoir, where the motif forms but a small area in the very centre of the painting. Palmer’s billowing foliage looks more solid and less leafy, and glows rich gold in the autumn sun.

The brilliant colours of autumn gave George Inness inspiration for Across the Hudson Valley in the Foothills of the Catskills (1868). Here the contrasting gold, red, and green trees are so marked as to appear almost unreal. He also provides good visual evidence of his use of the anatomical method in their construction.