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| Silver Studio (London) Frieze with Trees against a Sunset 1902 machine-printed wallpaper Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Johann Walter-Kurau Study of Trees 1932 oil on board Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Ivan Albright Tree Study, Unfinished - Georgia ca. 1960-70 watercolor and gouache Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Gustave Baumann Two Trees ca. 1924 tempera on paper Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Rosa Bonheur Tree Study before 1899 watercolor Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Gillian Carnegie Black Square 2004 photo-etching and aquatint Tate Gallery |
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| George Clausen Tree 1905 watercolor (study for The Ploughman's Breakfast) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne |
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| Karl Dankwart Tree with Broken Branch ca. 1675 gouache on prepared paper Gemäldegalerie, Dresden |
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| Edward Duncan Study of a Pollarded Tree before 1882 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
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| Carl Gaertner Tree Study 1948 watercolor Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Jeannette Klute Frosted Tree ca. 1950-60 dye transfer print Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| Pedro de Lemos The Cliff Dweller ca. 1915-20 color woodblock print Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Eliot Porter Sycamore Tree, Michigan 1973 dye transfer print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| George Richmond Study of a Tree ca. 1848 watercolor Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Jacobien de Rooij The Tree, The Wall 1989 drawing (colored chalks) Centraal Museum, Utrecht |
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| Ito Shinsui Pine Tree at Karasaki 1918 color woodblock print Art Institute of Chicago |
from Japanese Characters
To look into a word as through a window
and address the thing itself: a simple wish,
and one calling me to a simpler time –
yet when can that have been? Life before English?
Conversant in the automatic doors
of an alphabet we barely need to press
for meaning sprung wide-open, now it seems
that to sound things out again and memorize
new, ramifying claims upon the eyes
is, piece by piece, to reconstruct a cosmos
I'd grown to think long set and spoken-for.
Just as all life appears to have begun
the moment we were born, around the sun
of native language orbit vaguer bodies,
lagging with distance, unbreathable atmosphere:
seen as through clouds, a Venus thickly wrapped
in idioms colorful and yet inapt,
on Saturn a ring too loose for us to wear.
– Mary Jo Salter (1983)