Thursday, September 14, 2023

Trees (calligraphic)

Rodney Galarneau
Tree, Rochester, New York
1959
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

George Kendall Warren
Tree
1866
albumen print
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Marinus Heijl
Leafless Tree
before 1931
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

O. Winston Link
Train no. 17, The Birmingham Special,
passes a Giant Oak, Max Meadows, Virginia

1957
gelatin silver print
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

James Ward
A Stunted Oak
1822
drawing
Yale Center for British Art

attributed to Paulus Willemsz van Vianen
Study of Gnarled Tree
before 1613
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Benjamin Brecknell Turner
Eashing Bridge, Surrey
ca. 1852-54
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Beatrix Potter
Pollarded Willow
1882
watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Eliot Porter
Elephant Tree, Baja, Calif.
1966
dye transfer print
Princeton University Art Museum

Ilse Bing
Tree
1955
gelatin silver print
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Willem Roelofs
Trees near a Pond, West Wickham, Kent
1871
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Abraham Bloemaert
Leafless Tree
ca. 1590-1600
drawing
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Charles-François Daubigny
A Clump of Alder Trees
1862
etching
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

Caro Weir Ely
Untitled
before 1974
etching
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
(Achenbach Foundation)

Arthur Wesley Dow
Tree in Winter
ca. 1900
cyanotype
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jean-François Millet
Two Trees
ca. 1851-52
drawing (over earlier handwriting)
Yale University Art Gallery

Last night St. Ursula sent me her dianthus
out of her bedroom window, with her love 
living dianthus, and a single dried
sprig of her other window flower, vervain . . .
how many flowers are named in Genesis?
Good answer! Not one. Plenty of trees, however.
It was a poet planted flowerbeds
that Eden might be filled with tremulous,
frivolous petals – I dare say he was right,
they were made to be noticed! And to see
a poppy husk fall from a bursting flower
is to know something of the life to come
once the body has turned to dust & ashes,
even as our dying breath aspires
toward our Father's house . . . as for the trees,
what can we learn of noble constancy
more than we find in the pure laurel leaf,
so numerable, so sequent and serene?

– from Brantwood Senilia, a long poem by Paul Batchelor, heavily indebted to the writings and drawings of John Ruskin (1819-1900)