The Importance of Trees in Landscape Art

The importance of trees in Landscape art.

The smudged and shadowy trees you see in baroque paintings, in any old paintings from the 16th century on, in whatever context, have become that way over time, where the oils have darkened from their original luminosity and freshness, becoming sombre. This sombreness and shadowiness only serves to enhance them, however, or reveal an aesthetic quality the painters did not guess at. The shadows depicted are strangely like the shadows seen on a slightly out-of-focus camera obscura, an upside-down image projected into a closed room from the world outside. The camera obscura images in turn are oddly like the shadows that haunt the fringes of memory itself, and distant childhood memories in particular.
Man first saw the trees as spiritual things or abodes of spirits, in his early animist days which were like his early infancy. Trees seemed to move with the wind but also independently of it, and in the wind-swept leaves of a summer tree were born eddies and counter-eddies which seemed like the nodding of wise heads and sounded like the crashing of the sea.
This was the tree as distinct from the forest, the tree on its own, on a hill, exposed, but in the summer given the right conditions blooming to fullness and presenting a picture of multiplicity in unity, each leaf tribally attached to a stem from a branch or sub-branch of the main trunk, and this tree of life functioning together, though individual leaves may fall, and branches may weaken and wither.
This idea which always appeared awesome to man led him to conquer the tree, to enter the forest and to clear it, to burn the branches and use the wood to build gates, fences, tracks, roads and posts. But in his symbology he still had names and spirits and characteristics which he attributed to each tree, trees of the woods and riverbanks and now trees planted by meadows and on lone hills.
This tree planted on a lone hill took on significance as unencumbered by neighbours it spread wider and freer. It is the large spreading oak which can be seen in neoclassical landscapes, surmounting some tragic or decorous scene, serenely surveying some battle or surrender or siege, always with the stern browns, now turned dark, and the dark clusters of leaves, impassive and harmonious.
It was in fact this same ancestral tree growing decoratively above a scene, which later was depicted on its own and for its own sake, giving life to an otherwise flat landscape, and with the wind animating it also imparting movement, beside a meadow, a cultivated field, or an old farmhouse, granting both multiplicity, graceful movement, harmonious colour, and vertical structure to a scene. This tree even shorn of symbolism remained a tree of life, if only because it was a token of one's earliest childhood, almost of an eternal time before consciousness, in that its shadows, tones and chiaroscuros so clearly recalled an antedeluvian realm before knowledge, and its sound and movement, the relentless crashing of the waves on the first shore. Thus it its that the trees in the old paintings are so easy to recognise, though the passing scenes below them may seem foreign and strange to us, or obscure, the old symbols enduring when all else is subject to gradual change.