Portraits of Trees

Between us and a river lined with buildings on the far bank in the distance, tall willow trees nearly span the height of this horizontal landscape. The scene is loosely painted, and the color palette is almost completely dominated by cool tones of spring, sage, celery, and kelly green, and steel and sea blue. The grasses near us are painted with diagonal strokes that alternate direction and color as they move back toward the river. Golden yellow daubs in the lower right suggest blooms, and leaves on the trees are created with thin, upward strokes and dabs along slender branches. The trees reach high into a sky filled with sweeps of beige, blush pink, and spring green layered over pale blue. The river is a lavender gray, and the low, tightly clustered buildings are painted with a mix of ochre, peach, and denim blue. The artist has signed and dated the work in the lower right corner, though the final digit is illegible: “Claude Monet 188.”

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This horizontal photograph shows the twisting branches of a shiny silver tree, the sculpture rising high above the treetops of the living trees behind it. The trunk breaks into two sets of branches about a fifth of the way up the height of the sculpture. The branches to our left in this photograph curve and wind up and out while the branches to our right flare up in straighter lines. Diffused sunlight on the overcast day glints off the metal, creating bright white highlights against steel-gray shadows. The sculpture sits on a patch of grass with bushes and trees behind it.

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Trees and mountains nearly fill this composition and are painted with long, mostly parallel brushstrokes in this horizontal landscape. The trees are painted with long dashes of royal and aquamarine blue, pine and mint green to suggest leaves on coral-red trunks. The grass below is lemon-lime yellow, and a walking path is picked out with lavender-purple strokes. The mountains beyond the trees are painted with flat areas of coral, apricot orange, and cobalt blue. The sky above is pale turquoise with a few swirling, cream-colored clouds.

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We look through shadowed trees at a river winding into the distance in this horizontal landscape painting. Close to us, a cluster of three thin trees and a larger central tree are deep in shadow, which contrasts with the light-filled scene beyond. The topaz-blue river curves from the lower right corner, across the canvas, and into the distance at the center. A few spindly trees grow along the riverbank in front of a hut with a thatched roof to our right. The bank to our left is lined with reeds and tall grasses. Behind the central shadowed tree, a long, low, narrow boat is occupied by four people with pale skin. To our left, a person with a dark garment and white collar reclines near a seated man wearing yellow and a feathered cap. To our right, another person reclines near the boatman who pushes the boat through the water using a long pole. The harvest yellow and sage green of the riverbanks and vegetation beyond the boats fades to hazy, pale blue mountains along the horizon line, which comes just over halfway up the composition. White clouds float across a blue sky above.

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We look across the gleaming, forest-green surface of a lake at the foot of tall, jagged mountains in this horizontal landscape painting. The lake is flanked by a steep, gingerbread-brown hill on the left and a shoreline that forms a backward C curving from the lower center around and back along the right side of the composition. Strong sunlight from the upper left illuminates the center of the left-hand hill and the shoreline. The ground to our right is carpeted in rust-red, sage-green, and tan growth and is dotted with boulders. Tall trees with rust-brown trunks, crooked branches, and narrow canopies of caramel-brown and olive-green leaves fill the far end. Closest to us are dead tree trunks jutting out of the water and or lying on a flat, rocky outcropping nearby. Beyond the outcropping is a small black bear wandering down a sliver of sand-colored ground at the water’s edge. The hill on the left is covered with vertical rows of upright jagged boulders and slender, dark green trees marching up its slopes. A narrow, artic-blue waterfall cascades down its right side to empty into the lake. A thick layer of towering blue-gray clouds rises over the hill and lake, stretching back to the looming, snow-covered peaks that nearly brush the top edge of the canvas. The sky around the peak is vivid blue, scattered with high white clouds. The artist signed the lower right, “ABierstadt” with the A and B joined as a monogram.

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A young woman reclines and reads a book near a stream that winds through a wooded landscape in this horizontal painting. Painted with rich pine green, trees tower along the riverbanks and fill most of the painting. The olive-colored water seems to have cut straight down over time, creating high banks painted with tones of caramel and honey brown. Steel and slate-gray boulders are scattered in intervals near the river. Deep in the hazy blue distance, mountains line the horizon, which comes halfway up the composition. In the lower left corner of the painting, close to the river, the woman lies on her stomach as she props herself up on her elbows to read. She has pale white skin and her long, dark hair falls over her shoulders. Her white shirt hangs low over her shoulders, and her rose-pink skirt falls just short of her bare feet.

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$Blades of forest, pine, and sage green intermixed with slivers of cobalt and sky blue, crimson red, and rose pink create a band of abstracted tree-like forms across this horizontal painting. The blues, red, and pink are concentrated on a structure, presumably a tree, at the front center. To our left of center, geometric shapes like circles, triangles, and rectangles create the impression of a beaked bird, with each shape being fractured into bands of emerald green, royal blue, brick red, and butter yellow. Closer examination finds other birds nearly obscured within the dark, accordion-like patterns of the leaves, including a flock of red-eyed, black, razor-like birds to our left and another creature with a bird-like head and humanoid body to our right. Across the top third of the composition, the sky is pale blue to our left and brightens to shell pink and then light yellow around a disk-like form, to our right. A couple geometric, stylized shapes read as clouds near the upper left corner. Next to a tiny, white line drawing of two abstracted, animal-like forms in the lower right corner, the artist signed his name, “max ernst,” in white paint and the date, “1939” in red.$

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A woman wearing a mauve-pink dress rides a horse through a wooded landscape with tall, thin, pole-like trees in this vertical painting. However, the bodies of the horse and rider are shown in front of some of the trees and disappear behind others, confusing the eye. The woman has pale skin and wears a brimless cap the same color as her dress over blond hair. She rides erect, holding the reins to the reddish bay-brown horse, which walks with the back left and front right hooves raised. The tree trunks are painted with sage and forest-green vertical dashes against moss green. The leafy canopies are painted with dabs of grass green. The forest in the background is indicated with short strokes of spring, sage, and mint green. The grass below is created with dashes of emerald green and coffee brown against a golden-tan background. Because of the way the horse and rider are unpredictably covered by trees, our eye constantly shifts back and forth, trying to figure out if the rider is close to us or set farther back in the forest.

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A leafless, ash-white tree trunk has fallen from a broken stump into the wide V of a neighboring tree at the edge of a body of water near a verdant forest in this horizontal landscape painting. The fallen trunk creates a diagonal from near the lower left corner to the upper right. As it fell, it sheared off a substantial branch from a neighboring tree with a dark trunk. The bark where the damaged branch has pulled away is honey-orange, the same color as the leaves at the canopy, which has been pinned under the fallen trunk. Trees, vines, and other vegetation fill the space around and beyond this pair. In the lower right corner of the painting, vines grow over a broken stump, which deep in shadow. Between the stump and fallen tree, the peanut-brown surface of the water is smooth. Tiny in scale beneath the fallen tree and easily overlooked, there are two men and a dog in a boat. One man stands at the back of the boat and pushes it along with a long pole. He wears a tall, brown, cloth hat, a white shirt rolled up to the elbows under a blue vest, and loose-fitting pants. A second man wears a flat-topped, white hat with a black brim, a long, forest-green jacket, and tight-fitting slate-blue pants. He braces a rifle against one shoulder and shoots into the forest. The dog is white with brown spots, and it stands with its front paws on the edge of the boat, presumably ready to spring after the target. A patch of blue sky with puffy white clouds is seen above the trees in the upper left corner. The artist signed and dated the work in the lower right corner: “H. Vernet Rome 1833.”

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We look across a rutted, dirt road at a rickety wooden gate that leans precipitously to our right, at the same angle as the bare tree behind it in this horizontal landscape painting. The road curves from the lower right corner to the center of the composition, and continues back over a low rise. The gate leans back at an angle next to the road, near the lower right center of the painting. An area in shadow to our right could be the fence continuing along in front of a building with a sloping, moss-green roof that echoes the angle of the gate and tree. The bare branches of the tree twist into the sky from the leaning trunk. A tuft of laurel-green trees peeks up over the road where it passes through the gate. There is a fence post and scrubby bush on the left side of the road. Closer inspection reveals a few people, loosely painted, tucked into the landscape with one to our right of the tree and two just over the hill beyond the gate. A few swipes of white near that pair could be sheep or other animals walking along the road in front of them. Finally, a person, notably tiny in scale so out of proportion to the rest of the scene, stands holding a staff in the shadow cast by the gate. The sky above has white and straw-yellow clouds sweeping up from the horizon, which comes a quarter of the way up the composition, against a dove-gray sky.

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