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.

Following their popularisation in the nineteenth century, paintings of Spring blossom continued to flourish, reinforced perhaps by increasing urbanisation.

Helen Allingham’s Buckinghamshire house at Penstreet (c 1900) shows a house in the hamlet of Penn Street, near the village of Penn, in Buckinghamshire, England. This remains a relatively unspoilt part of the Chilterns to the north-west of London.

For Willard Metcalf, Dogwood Blossoms (1906) also provide the opportunity to explore the shimmering effects of dappled light, and how it can break the forms of large boulders.

Pierre Bonnard painted Early Spring in 1908, shortly after his return to France from a visit to North Africa. The children are probably the artist’s friends from the Terrasse family, enjoying their garden as it comes into bloom in the improving weather.

The Small House, Spring Evening is an unusual landscape painted by Bonnard in 1909. It offsets the rich blossom on the trees at the left against the plain wall of a house, seen in failing light.

József Rippl-Rónai was the founding father of modern painting in Hungary, and in 1909 painted this Sour Cherry Tree in Blossom, in which the flowers overwhelm the whole painting, just as they had for Samuel Palmer nearly eighty years earlier.

One of the eclectic Georges Clairin’s later paintings from about 1910 brings an elegant group out among lush blossoms On the Balcony.

John William Waterhouse’s A Song of Springtime from 1913 has lost much of the narrative from more classical accounts of Flora and the Spring, but still features plenty of cherry blossom. Flora appears with her breasts bared, and a skirtful of daffodils or narcissi, perhaps a cross-reference to Poussin’s figure of Narcissus in his Empire of Flora, and the Graces have been replaced by young children.

By the First World War, Western artists weren’t just collecting and studying the art of south-east Asia, but some went to live in countries such as Japan. Among these was the American printmaker Helen Hyde, who demonstrates her mastery of colour woodcut prints in her Blossom Time in Tokyo, from 1914. This shows the tea ceremony taking place during the Spring viewing of blossom.

By the end of the war, Théo van Rysselberghe’s colours had become as strong as those of the Fauves. In Almond Trees in Blossom (Morning) the more delicate pinks of the flowers pale in comparison with his full reds and blues, even down to the blue horse pulling a plough.

The Ukrainian artist Mykhaylo Berkos painted this classic Impressionist motif of an Apple Tree in Blossom in 1919. But this was to be his last Spring, as he died of typhus just before Christmas that year, at the age of only 58.

In the far north of Europe, the Norwegian Nikolai Astrup included blossom in many of his paintings of Spring and early summer in the fjords, as in his Apple Trees in Bloom, painted after 1920.

In about 1927, Astrup painted Apple Tree in Bloom showing the trees in full blossom and marsh marigolds in flower.

In Pierre Bonnard’s Open Door from about 1937, we look out through the frame of French windows to a table that has escaped into the landscape, and dazzles against brilliant blossom beyond.

I wish you a happy blossom festival, and above all peace.

Given the technical challenge of painting optically faithful reflections on water, the painstaking and protracted work required for Divisionist techniques resulted in the omission of reflections, or only notional depictions. This article gathers some examples of Divisionist paintings that were taken the extra mile, and tried to do better.

Seurat’s first and greatest masterpiece, generally known as La Grande Jatte, uses the technique of optical mixing of colour. Rather than blending pigments on the canvas, it’s constructed of tiny high chroma dots to allow for optical mixing. Recognising the difficulty of recreating reflections when he was laboriously applying those dots to the large canvas for his finished painting, Seurat developed them in smaller studies such as that above.

Those are seen quoted in the finished work, which took him almost eighteen months to paint in three stages between 1884-86.

The Seine at Rouen, the Île Lacroix, Effect of Fog from 1888 is one of Camille Pissarro’s best-known Divisionist paintings, and one of the few to depict reflections in detail. This was based on studies he had made during a visit to the city back in 1883, five years before he started work on this finished painting.

Paul Signac also made use of sketches made in front of the motif, such as this of Les Andelys. Le Quai from 1886, which contains extensive passages of reflections.

His finished view of Les Andelys. Côte d’aval, completed the same year, completely omits reflections, though.

A different view of the same village, Les Andelys. La Berge, from the same year, includes extensive reflections that appear fairly accurate.

Signac’s Sunset, Herblay, painted in September 1889, is a good attempt but has small disparities. For example, reflected images of the trees seen on the bank at the left don’t tally with their originals in either vertical or horizontal dimension.

Evening Calm, Concarneau, Opus 220 (Allegro Maestoso) from 1891 must have been a major challenge that Signac carries off with aplomb. Again there are some small discrepancies: the most prominent boat in the foreground is heeling slightly to the left, but the left side of its reflection if anything leans slightly to the right.

Reflections are even more complex in Signac’s Tartanes pavoisées, or Fishing Boats Dressed Overall, from 1893. To get its triangular composition right, and inform his rendering of the reflections, he painted three studies for this. Despite that, two years later he traded this painting for a bicycle, but in 1910 it became his first painting to enter a public collection, in Wuppertal, Germany.

Another challenging view of The Port of Saint-Tropez from 1901-2 is less precise, but uses reflections to great effect.

Signac’s later Giudecca Anchorage from 1904 uses coarser tiles of colour, giving him more leeway.

Of all the Neo-Impressionist and Divisionist paintings of reflections, the undisputed champion must be Théo van Rysselberghe’s Canal in Flanders from 1894. This too was preceded by a study, but that almost completely excluded any reflections. The artist then moved his viewpoint to the right, and must have spent months getting its reflections right.

This uniquely combines radical perspective projection, intense rhythm and meticulous reflections. The artist painted few further views with reflections afterwards.