I had already been thinking about trees — not trees as in a glade and certainly not in terms of a whole forest — just about trees, single trees. Then, in the midst of this, I found myself standing in front of Jacob van Ruisdael’s The Great Oak (1652, above) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Another artist, Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem, added the figures in the foreground.)

This painting is one of van Ruisdael’s masterpieces, perhaps the greatest in a series of works van Ruisdael painted of majestic trees in the early 1650s. It’s so great that the museum once built an entire exhibition around it. (And then made sure no one noticed by effectively renting out nearby galleries to a shameful and effectively rented, not-really-King Tut exhibition. That exhibition, a 2005 van Ruisdael retrospective curated by legendary Dutch art scholar Seymour Slive and LACMA’s Patrice Marandel, isn’t even mentioned anymore on LACMA’s website.)

Van Ruisdael’s oak is the kind of graceful, tough, stoic mega-flora that would naturally appeal to a Golden Age painter (and his customer base). It is spotlit by strong, Northern sunlight. The oak is twice as big as anything else on the canvas. There are other trees in the background, but this is unquestionably a feature presentation about the great oak. Because this is the Dutch Golden Age, when nearly everything stands for something else, it’s easy to read the sun shining on a mighty, old oak as a reference to how God smiles on the sturdy, hearty, durable Dutch. And so we will.

As you can probably tell, it’s one of my favorite paintings. At LACMA, I stood in front of the it for at least 10 minutes, long enough for it to help pull together some thoughts on artists and their love of trees. (And to motivate a guard to pay a little more attention to me, which was fine.)

Those thoughts start here: Yesterday I reviewed a Robert Adams retrospective that’s on view now at the Denver Art Museum. One of the glorious things about the exhibition was that Adams’ love of trees, single, distinctive, individual trees, shone through.

Ever since the 1970s, Adams has been taking photographs of trees. Some of Adams’s trees are mighty and majestic, some are wispy. Some even have visages, the flora equivalent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Great Stone Face. The Adams at right is Cape Blanco State Park, Oregon, from “Turning Back” (1999-2003). It is one of his best pictures.

As I stood in front of the van Ruisdael, I thought about the antecedents to Adams’ trees and about how trees have been a very big thing in art. There are lots of reasons for this: They’re pretty. They fill empty space, rounding out a composition. Artists have felt close to them: Before canvas became popular as a painted surface in the 16th century, artists painted on either plaster or in panels, panels that came from whatever suitable trees were nearby. Durer painted on poplar, Cranach used beech, Leonardo used French oak. Van Ruisdael would have known that the Dutch artists in whose footsteps he followed, painters like Dieric Bouts — more on him in a minute — used oak too.

Another is that a tree is there in the very beginning of the Bible, in Genesis, when Eve handed Adam an apple. (Thing is, very rarely do we see that tree in art. We see the branch, we see the fruit, but how often do you see the whole damn tree?) The tree gives life.

The first great trees in European art were probably Albrecht Durer’s. From Durer forward, artists from Northern Europe would be especially fond of the single tree. Let’s start a little wander through some trees with Durer. I’ll finish up after the holiday with Robert Adams and another artist who is in the news this season. Start the fun by clicking on “continue reading” down there at the right (or just start scrolling)…

Albrecht Durer, Linden on a Bastion, c. 1489. Collection of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Albrecht Durer, Pine, c. 1495-1497. Collection of The British Museum. Albrecht Durer, Willow Mill, 1496-98. Collection of the Bibliotheque National, Paris.

If I’d been an artist around 1502 or 1503, I’d probably have been pretty crushed: Leonardo was starting David, and a year or two later he’d start the Mona Lisa. Fat chance I’d be able to match either. And then I’d have to deal with that pine tree of Durer’s too?! It seems almost as impregnable. I think I might have considered an alternate path.

But artists being artists, they found a way to innovate: They started finding other ways to use trees in their work. One way that happened was through the window, almost literally. Until a few decades before now, portraits were pretty standardized: The sitter’s bust-in-profile against a single-color background, or something pretty close to it. The first painting below is a good example. (Formerly attributed to Uccello, it’s the kind of painting that Martin Puryear loves.) Near the end of the 15th-century, painters began to paint sitters in three-quarter profile. Then eventually artists turned him or her to face the painter/viewer. Through much of this innovation, the single-color background dominated.

Master of the Castello Nativity, Portrait of a Woman, probably 1450s. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Youth, c. 1482.  Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Finally, sometime late in the 15th-century, painters began to open up that space behind the sitter.

Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Young Woman, after 1480, Collection of Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

Hans Memling, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1482. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

And once that space had been opened up, once it became possible to put a window back there, it quickly became possible to make a landscape or something else visible out that window. Something like, you know, a tree.

Moretto da Brescia, Portrait of a Man, c. 1520-25. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Depending on where in Europe you happened to be painting, artists had already started including solitary trees as decoration in the  windows behind portrait sitters and behind figures in religious paintings. That makes sense: A single tree could be a reference to the tree of life, a reference to the garden of Eden. In this reading, the tree reminds us of Mary’s redemptive goodness, how the Virgin’s purity makes up for Eve’s apple-lovin’ hedonism.

Fra Filippo Lippi, Annunciation, c. 1445. San Lorenzo, Florence.

Sandro Botticelli, Cestello Annunciation, 1489-90, Collection of Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child Blessing, 1510. Collection of Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

It’s hard to identify many of these trees now (paint loss, fading, etc.), but it stands to reason that the tree selected by the painter may have indicated something about the personality of the figure with whom the tree was ‘paired.’ The tree in the Bouts below seems less an indication of wilderness from which John the Baptist emerged than it does a composition-filler, but it’s still pretty great.

Dieric Bouts, St. John the Baptist, c. 1470. Collection of Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

Sometimes, as in the Botticelli Annunciation above, the entire paintings seeming to descend from a central tree. (In the Botticelli, the tree sits just to the left of the vanishing point, kind of holding down the rest of the painting.) The Giorgione below seems to revolve around that little sapling in the middle of the painting, perhaps a reference to the promise of the youth who sits below it. (Imagine it without the horse in the center-right. It was added in the 20th-century.)

Giorgione, The Sunset, 1506-1510. Collection of the National Gallery, London.

Claude, Landscape with David at the Cave of Adullam, 1645. Collection of the National Gallery, London.

I could keep presenting lovely Italian trees, but you probably get the idea.

While the Italian artists were all about using trees as part of religious paintings, northern artists would soon remember Durer’s example and would focus on individual trees.

Jan van Goyen, Landscape with Oak, 1645. Collection of The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

If you liked what van Ruisdael did in spotlighting his great oak with sunlight, you’ll love what Rembrandt does in what might be his greatest landscape painting.

Rembrandt, The Stone Bridge, ca. 1638. Collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Skipping right ahead to the 19th-century, I’m particularly fond of this Gustave Courbet, which features a tree in the landscape animated by weather. It’s probably the greatest Courbet in America.

Gustave Courbet, The Gust of Wind, ca. 1865. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

This is a lot of trees, and I’ve pretty much skipped over a century or two. Among the painters who noticed all these trees was Piet Mondrian. Apparently Mondrian decided that he’d just flat-out had enough of these damn things and decided that they should be deconstructed, reduced to abstraction, killing them once and for all. So he did.

Piet Mondrian, Avond (Evening), Red Tree, 1908. Collection of Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

Piet Mondrian, Gray Tree, 1911. Collection of Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

Piet Mondrian, Flowering Apple Tree, 1912. Collection of Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

Piet Mondrian, Composition Trees II, 1912-13. Collection of Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

So thanks to Mondrian, the tree is dead, long live the tree, right? Long live the tree, indeed. We’ll pick up next week with two photographers — and a few other artists — who have kept the tree alive.