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| Crescenzio Onofri Dead Tree before 1698 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Roelant Savery Gnarled Tree near Water before 1639 etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Paul Troger Fallen Tree with Ruins before 1762 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Hubert Robert Landscape with Large Tree ca. 1763 drawing Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Caspar Scheuren Study of Tree ca. 1830-40 drawing, with added watercolor Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Elder Landscape with Gnarled Tree before 1835 etching Yale University Art Gallery |
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| Elizabeth Murray Rotting Tree 1850 watercolor on paper Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Louis Crette Tree Study ca. 1859 albumen print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| Frederic Edwin Church Study of Tree Trunk 1865 oil on cardboard Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Constant Alexandre Famin Oak Tree, Forest of Fontainebleau ca. 1860-70 albumen print Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| George Elgar Hicks Gnarled Tree Trunk ca. 1880 oil on paper Ulster Museum, Belfast |
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| Anonymous-photograph- Giant Yew, Crom Castle, County Fermanagh, Ireland ca. 1903 platinum print Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Donald Ross Gnarled Tree, Sierra Nevada 1950 gelatin silver print Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Ansel Adams Aspens, Northern New Mexico 1958 gelatin silver print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Donald Bowen Oak Tree Trunk, Wimbledon Parkside 1964 drawing Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Jeff Wall A Sapling held by a Post 2000 C-print Tate Gallery |
from Like Gods
The philosopher David Lewis spun a fantasy of two omniscient gods who know about one world, which might as well be ours. Each knows precisely all there is to know, the grand "totality of facts, not things." Each knows the pattern of the light on each neglected leaf millennia ago. Each knows the number of the stars, their ages, all the distances between them, all the "things too tiny to be remembered in recorded history – the backfiring of a bus/In a Paris street in 1932," as well as all the things that history distorts or just can't see, like the thought that must have flashed across Patroklos's mind (if he'd existed and had had a mind – the middle knowledge of the schoolmen) when Hektor split his stomach with a spear (if he'd existed too). Each one looks on, as though through ordinary eyes, as "Mme Swann's enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist and as infantile as St George in the picture, endeavored to curb the ardour of the quivering steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered over the ground," and sees "the gray 'toppers' of old" the gentlemen strolling with her wore, the little "woolen cap from which stuck out two blade-like partridge feathers" that she wore (or would have worn if they and she'd been real). Each monitors the photons through the slits, the slow decay of radium, and knows the ratio of vermouth to gin in someone's first martini at Larre's. Each knows what Darragh, Geoff and Willy knew before the bullet or the pavement killed their worlds, and where the shots came from in Dallas. Each knows precisely what the other knows, in all the senses of those words, and if a question has a factual answer, each can answer it. Yet there's a question neither can resolve: which god am I?
The question posits both a world and a unique perspective on that world, which neither has. And if gods One and Two could reify themselves by wondering who or what they were, they'd have to know the answer – and, because they don't, they can't. Could gods like those be real, in something like the sense that you and I are real? But then, what sense is that? Gods One and Two are you and I writ large: I wander out into the day and feel the sunlight on my face. I see the sunlight on the first spring leaves like green foam on the trees, and so do you. The world we have in common, that the gods can comprehend in its entirety, remains beyond my grasp, and yours. The world I know belongs entirely to me, as yours belongs entirely to you. I know my world completely, as the gods know ours, because it's nothing but my take on things, and starts and ends with me. I'm both the author and the captive of my world, because my take on things is all there is to me. When Mary, in Frank Jackson's philosophical diversion, wanders from her room of black and white and shades of gray and finally sees a rose, and then goes on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, and drinks coffee, and talks for hours, it's hard to see how all of this (as she might say) could be an artifact of her perspective. But it is.
– John Koethe (2011)