Monday, April 27, 2026

Art (Arboreal)

Giotto
St Francis preaching to the Birds
ca. 1297-99
tempera on panel
Musée du Louvre


Meindert Hobbema
The Cottage
ca. 1663
oil on panel
Detroit Institute of Arts

Albert Flamen
Vue de Conflan du côté d'Ivry
before 1669
etching
British Museum

Louis-Gustave Taraval after Louis Bosse
Stove Design for an Orangerie
ca. 1791
hand-colored etching
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Jean-Louis Demarne
The Seine at Saint-Cloud
ca. 1795
oil on canvas
Frick Art Museum, Pittsburgh

Cornelius Varley
Pastoral Landscape with Figure
ca. 1830
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Alexandre Calame
Summer
1850
oil on canvas
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Linnaeus Tripe
Umbrella Tree near Trimium
1858
albumen print from waxed paper negative
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Robert Swain Gifford
Near the Coast
1885
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Robert Swain Gifford
Near the Coast
1886
etching
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Emily K. Herron
Untitled
before 1893
cyanotype
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Arthur Dove
Barge, Trees, Silver Ball
1930
oil on board
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Vance Kirkland
Timberline Abstraction
1950
oil on linen
Denver Art Museum

Brett Weston
Banyan Roots
1973
gelatin silver print
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Mitch Epstein
Biloxi, Mississippi
2005
C-print
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Andrew Moore
Cucumber Tree Magnolia
2006
inkjet print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, New York

Yuichiro Sato
In the Air III: Birch Tree
2019
acrylic on paper
British Museum

Paragraphs from Blake's MS. Book concerning his picture 
of The Last Judgment, a picture now lost

    The Last Judgment is not Fable or Allegory, but Vision.  Fable or Allegory are a totally distinct & interior kind of Poetry.  Vision of Imagination is a Representation of what Eternally Exists, Really & Unchangeably.  Fable or Allegory is Form'd by the daughters of Memory.  Imagination is Surrounded by the daughters of Inspiration, who in the aggregate are call'd Jerusalem.  Fable is Allegory, but what Critics call the Fable, is Vision itself.  The Hebrew Bible & the Gospel of Jesus are not Allegory, but Eternal Vision, or Imagination of All that Exists. 

    Note here that Fable or Allegory is seldom without some Vision.  Pilgrim's Progress is full of it, the Greek Poets the same, but Allegory & Vision ought to be known as Two Distinct Things, & so call'd for the Sake of Eternal Life.
    
    The Last Judgment is one of those Stupendous Visions.  I have represented it as I saw it; to different People it appears differently as every thing else does; for tho' on Earth things seem Permanent, they are less permanent than a Shadow, as we all know too well.

– William Blake (ca. 1818)