Friday, September 15, 2023

Trees (forest)

Eugène Bléry
Trunk of Beech Tree, Fontainebleau
1845
etching
Indianapolis Museum of Art

Théodore Rousseau
In the Forest of Fontainebleau
ca. 1850
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Gustave Le Gray
Study of an Oak Tree, Forest of Fontainebleau
1852
salted paper print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Eugène Cuvelier
Tree Study, Fontainebleau
1860
albumen print
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

attributed to Eugène Cuvelier
Forest Landscape
ca. 1860-70
albumen print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

René-Ernest Huet
Fir Tree, Fôret des Landes, Aquitaine
1909
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Nicolas Poussin
Path leading into a Forest Clearing
ca. 1635-40
drawing
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Eugène Cicéri
Pine Tree in a Forest
1865
drawing
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

follower of Gillis van Coninxloo
Forest Scene
ca. 1595-1610
gouache on black paper
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Frank Duveneck
Beech Woods at Polling, Bavaria
ca. 1878
oil on canvas
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

Francis Hopkinson Smith
In the Woods
1877
watercolor
Brooklyn Museum

Adam Pynacker
Study of Trees in a Wood
before 1673
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Charles Reginald Aston
Trees on a Hill in a Wooded Landscape
ca. 1880
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

attributed to Asher Brown Durand
Forest Trees
before 1886
drawing
Yale University Art Gallery

Andrew MacCullum
Study of Beeches at Epping
1858
watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

David Cox
Sherwood Forest
before 1859
drawing
British Museum

from Field and Forest

When you look down from the airplane you see lines,
Roads, ruts, braided into a net or web –
Where people go, what people do: the ways of life.

Heaven says to the farmer: "What's your field?"
And he answers: "Farming," with a field,
Or: "Dairy-farming," with a herd of cows.
They seem a boy's toy cows, seen from this high.

Seen from this high,
The fields have a terrible monotony.

But between the lighter patches there are dark ones.
A farmer is separated from a farmer
By what farmers have in common: forests,
Those dark things – what the fields were to begin with.
At night a fox comes out of the forest, eats his chickens.
At night the deer come out of the forest, eat his crops.

If he could he'd make farm out of all the forest,
But it isn't worth it: some of it's marsh, some rocks,
There are things there you couldn't get rid of 
With a bulldozer, even – not with dynamite.
Besides, he likes it. He had a cave there, as a boy;
He hunts there now. It's a waste of land,
But it would be a waste of time, a waste of money,
To make it into anything but what it is.

– Randall Jarrell (1962)