#trees
Art the community tagged “trees” — see what people make of it.
No posts tagged “trees” yet.
Landscape from Kragerø by Edvard Munch, 1912
This came from a string of coastal landscapes painted while recovering from a breakdown — a much quieter stretch than the work he's known for.
Erisava: This is way too calm for who I think painted it.
Report Post
View At Rouelles, Le Havre by Claude Monet, 1858
Wikipedia has this down as the earliest painting of his that anyone knows about, done when he was seventeen, out by a stream near Le Havre. It's signed with the name Oscar — apparently that was the first half of his actual name, and he dropped it in his twenties.
Erisava: Nothing's happening here and I'd still put it on my wall.
Report Post
Landscape with Fisherman and a Young Woman by François Boucher, 1769
The oval is the clue: pictures shaped like this were usually made to fit a panel over a door or a fireplace, ordered as part of the decorating rather than hung on a nail. From what I've read this one came with a companion piece the same size.
Erisava: This is very green and very dark. What do you get out of a picture like this?
Report Post
The Farm at Les Collettes, Cagnes by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1911
The story goes he bought this farm to stop the old olive trees being pulled up for a flower nursery, then spent his last years painting the place. By then his hands were badly arthritic — apparently brushes had to be wedged into them for him.
Erisava: Is this actually finished, or did he just stop?
Report Post
Farm near Duivendrecht by Piet Mondrian, 1916
I couldn't turn up much on this exact one, but Mondrian returned to this same farm and its reflection again and again in these years, like something about it wouldn't let him go.
Erisava: Every branch is basically a scribble of orange, and it still reads as a tree.
Report Post
Mountain Landscape by Louis Eilshemius, 1914
He apparently spent decades loudly declaring himself a genius to anyone who'd listen and got nowhere — until Duchamp, of all people, picked him out of an exhibition and started championing him.
Erisava: Never heard of him. Is he famous or really considered a genius?
Report Post
Landscape with Two Poplars by Wassily Kandinsky, 1912
Wikipedia puts him with a group of Munich painters who reckoned a picture could work the way music does — colour doing the carrying, the scene barely hanging on. Apparently this comes from the stretch of years when the nameable things were on their way out of his pictures for good. Not long after, there was nothing left in them to point at.
Erisava: I'm told this is a landscape and I'm just taking their word for it.
Report Post
The River by Maxime Maufra, 1902
He apparently gave up a business career around 1890 to paint full-time and fell in with Gauguin's crowd in Brittany — though you'd never guess that from a quiet river scene like this one.
Erisava: This is pretty, but I feel like I have seen thousands of these before.
Report Post
Landscape at Dusk by Henri Harpignies, 1902
He seems to be painting almost nothing but trees his whole life, and kept at it into his nineties — someone supposedly called him 'the Michelangelo of trees', which is a lot of title for a man who mostly did quiet evenings like this.
Erisava: It's so dark I can barely see it. Is that on purpose, or has it just aged?
Report Post
Almond Blossom by Vincent van Gogh, 1890
Painted as a present for his brother's newborn son, who'd been given his name. They say the family hung it over their bed. The flat, bright look of it supposedly owes a lot to the Japanese prints he collected.
Erisava: That blue behind the branches is where all the action is, and I don't mind at all.