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.

We still haven’t got New Year right, have we? Rather than putting it in the middle of winter, it should surely coincide with the arrival of Spring and blossom on trees. If you’re in a northern temperate latitude, now’s the time that you should be watching for the full flush of cherry and other flowering trees. In Washington DC its blossom festival extends a month from mid-March, in Japan rather later, and it’s even celebrated in Perth, in Western Australia, during the austral Spring.

This weekend I celebrate the end of the winter with two days of paintings of blossom on trees, today’s from the nineteenth century, and tomorrow from the twentieth.

Early in Samuel Palmer’s career, when he was living in Shoreham in Kent, he painted this watercolour of exuberant blossom In a Shoreham Garden, in about 1830.

The Pre-Raphaelite movement emphasised painting from life; when John Everett Millais came to paint Flora and her Spring, in 1856-59, he added subtle allusions to Botticelli’s famous Primavera and classical myth. The blossom here is on apple trees, which are probably second only to May or Hawthorn in the English countryside at this time of year.

In the year that Charles-François Daubigny moved to Auvers-sur-Oise and founded the artists’ colony there, he painted this blossom-rich view of the Spring Landscape (1862). Vincent van Gogh was later to spend his final two months of painting near here.

In the closing years of Jean-François Millet’s life, he painted a commissioned series including this startling study of light, Spring (1868-73). This features a double rainbow at the upper left, with fleeting sunshine flooding the centre and dazzling on the abundant blossom. From the crops and seasonal flowers in the foreground to the inky black shower-clouds in the sky, this is a perfect summary of Spring in the countryside, and April showers.

My favourite Impressionist painting of blossom has to be Alfred Sisley’s panorama of The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring, painted soon after he had moved to Marly-le-Roi in 1875.

Alice Havers’ Washerwomen, which given her tragically brief life must have been painted around 1880, shows a large orchard of fruit trees in blossom on the far side of the river.

By any measure, the nineteenth century master of blossom was Vincent van Gogh. Like several of his contemporaries, he had become a collector of Japanese woodcut prints, and was fascinated by one of their dominant themes, cherry blossom.

Before he went to Arles, Vincent van Gogh had copied Utagawa Hiroshige’s woodblock print The Plum Orchard in Kameido. Shortly after his arrival there in 1888, the fruit trees came into flower, and he painted a triptych for his brother Theo’s apartment, including The Pink Orchard above, and The Pink Peach Tree below.

Van Gogh’s approach to painting blossoming fruit trees is completely different from that of the Japanese prints. His trees are built anatomically, with trunk and branches drawn in outline, often using contrasting colour. Flowers are applied using impasto; sadly some of these have faded since, and some paint that now appears white or off-white was originally pinker.

Van Gogh’s View of Arles, Flowering Orchards (1889) is a complex composition, with trunks in the foreground, fruit trees in flower in the middle distance, and the town of Arles behind, integrating his previous explorations of each element.

Among Carl Larsson’s many intimate views of life at home is this watercolour of his daughter under the Apple Blossom from 1894. He uses his favourite colour contrast between the earth red of the barns behind with the pink of the girl’s bonnet, against the rich green vegetation around her.

Some sixty-five years after Palmer’s exuberant clouds of blossom, Paul Sérusier employed a similar technique in The White Cow, from about 1895.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s finely detailed double portrait of Spring. Ebba and Sigrid Kähler from 1895 appears to show a mother and her daughter talking in their garden, but the two are actually sisters. At the right is Sigrid, the year before her wedding, at the left is her sister Ebba, who was fifteen at the time. Ring uses a light touch with the blossom and Spring flowers to avoid overwhelming the figures.

Although it’s widely known that Jules Breton had a daughter, Virginie Demont-Breton (1859–1935), who went on to paint, few today realise how successful she was, and how distinctive and delightful her paintings are. As is usual for women artists, lamentably few of her paintings are available as usable images, and little is reported of her career. This article is as much as I know.

She was born and named Virginie Élodie Marie Thérèse to Jules and Élodie Breton, in Courrières, inland from Calais on the north-east coast of France, on 26 July 1859. She was a precocious artist, and had her first work accepted by the Paris Salon in 1879 when she was still nineteen. She married the painter Adrien Demont the following year, after which she signed her paintings as Virginie Demont-Breton.

In her early career, she specialised in painting mothers with their young children. Her First Steps (1881-2) was exhibited at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles in 1881, although dated 1882, and was shown in the Salon in 1882. From there it was sold to Goupil, who sold it to the USA, where her paintings did as well as those of her father.

She was awarded a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Amsterdam in 1883, although I have been unable to identify which work(s) brought her that distinction.

The Beach (1883), painted on the Channel coast, was exhibited at the Salon in 1883, where it earned her ‘hors-concours’ (because of exemplary record, her works didn’t need to be submitted to the jury in future), and was purchased by the state.

That year she joined the French Union of Women Painters and Sculptors, and served as its president from 1895-1901. Among her achievements for the Union was the full admission of women to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and their eligibility for the competition for the prestigious Prix de Rome.

L’homme est en mer (The Man is at Sea) (1889) is probably her best-known painting, and shows a fisherman’s wife warming herself and her sleeping infant by the fire, while her husband is away fishing at sea. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1889, where it was rapidly engraved for prints.

The reason for the fame of that painting is in part because of Vincent van Gogh’s copy, L’homme est en mer (The Man is at Sea, after Demont-Breton) (1889), painted when he was undergoing treatment in the Saint Paul asylum at Saint-Rémy. Van Gogh based this on a printed reproduction.

In 1890, she and her husband moved to the small fishing village of Wissant, on the Côte d’Opale between the capes of Blanc-Nez and Gris-Nez, between Calais and Boulogne. The following year they started construction on a villa in neo-Egyptian style they named Typhonium, now a preserved historical site.

Their house became the focus of a group of artists known as the Wissant School, which was active until the early twentieth century. Members included Félix Planquette, Fernand Stievenard, Valentine Pépe, Henri and Marie Duhem, and Virginie and her husband Adrien.

This detail of Virginie’s Portrait of Marie Duhem (1889) shows one of their close friends and colleagues in the Wissant School, at work en plein air on the coast near their house.

In 1893, Virginie was among the French women artists who took part in the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, forming its Woman’s Building.

This monochrome reproduction of Stella Maris (1894) is one of Virginie’s many paintings using maritime motifs, developed after moving to Wissant. Stella Maris is a popular name for Polaris, the Pole Star, which has been used since ancient times for celestial navigation, but the artist’s principal reference here is to its use as a traditional synonym for the Virgin Mary.

The wrecked mariners clinging on to the rigging have been joined by a vision of the Virgin Mary, who bears the infant Jesus in her arms. This painting was exhibited at the Salon in 1895, and the print comes from a 1905 book on Women Painters of the World.

In 1894, Virginie was admitted to the Legion of Honour, and in 1896 was recognised by the Rosati Society for her achievements.

She continued painting intimate family scenes around the Channel coast. Into the water! (c 1898) shows a fisherman’s wife taking her young children for what may well have been their only opportunity to bathe properly.

Men of the Sea (1898) is another monochrome reproduction of a full-colour original painting, showing the fishermen of Wissant landing their catch on the beach. This compares with her father’s earlier (1879ish) paintings of fisherfolk in Brittany, and Winslow Homer’s famous paintings from 1881 of those at Cullercoats, north-east England.

Première audace premier frisson (First dare, first thrill) (1900) is a monochrome reproduction showing two young children entering the water at Wissant. This was exhibited at the Salon in 1900.

Like her father, later in Virginie’s career she turned to writing poetry and prose, which were also successful. Her collected poems were published in 1920, and four volumes of memoires between 1926-1930. She died in Paris on 10 January 1935.

Among her undated works are the following.

Mother and Child in an Orange Grove (above) was probably painted in the south of France, as was Under the Orange Tree (below).

Alma Mater is an unusual version of the Nativity, in which the Virgin Mary’s traditional blue has been transferred to the painted plaster behind her, so she can be dressed in white.

Le Divin Apprenti (The Divine Apprentice) is a monochrome reproduction of a full-colour original. This shows the Holy Family in Joseph’s carpenter’s shop. The elderly Joseph guides Jesus in sharpening a knife on a whetstone turned by his mother Mary. Sunlight cast through the window illuminates the boy’s head.

This compares with John Millais’ famous Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-50).

Young Fisherman Watches the Sea is a thoughtful portrait of a young man whose future depends on his abilities to survive at sea. Note how painterly are the waves and other details in the background, which are also deliberately defocussed.

Although there are no books devoted to her work, as far as I can discover, a catalog raisonné is being prepared, which will be a major step forward in documenting her paintings properly. Not as great a modern Master as her father, perhaps, like the work of the women Impressionists, she broadened the appeal of painting, and was important in opening up art as a career for women. She deserves greater recognition.

Reference

Wikipedia.