Humans have lived with trees since our origins, and trees feature in many paintings. This explains the importance of sketching them from life, and shows examples of different species and contrasting artists from Rubens and van Ruisdael to van Gogh and Cézanne.
landscape
Two groups of paintings: figures seen mostly in planar mirrors arranged vertically, and landscapes reflected by a horizontal water surface.
The botanical painter Marianne North, Val Prinsep who was born in Kolkata and painting for Queen Victoria, Colin Campbell Cooper, and Nicholas Roerich, who died there in 1947.
From William Hodges in around 1780, Edward Lear nearly a century later, and Vasily Vereshchagin at about the same time, views of the Taj Mahal and the Himalayan mountains.
Following another visit to Ecuador and Colombia in 1857, he painted his masterwork ‘The Heart of the Andes’, which had to be viewed using opera glasses to appreciate its intricate detail.
Paintings by Blechen, Brendekilde, Tina Blau, William Merritt Chase and Prendergast, of the Villa Borghese, the Prater, Central Park and Prospect Park.
Paintings by West, Linnell, De Nittis, Fanner, Maitland, Manet, Menzel, Prendergast and Pissarro, of London’s Royal Parks, and the Tuileries in Paris.
One of the founding American masters, sole pupil of the founder of the Hudson River School, his landscapes are meticulously detailed and painted in the studio from many plein air oil sketches.
Unusual use and manipulation of reflections by Ferdinand Hodler in his Parallelism, and by Gustav Klimt painting through a telescope on his summer holidays.
Paintings by Helen Allingham, Willard Metcalf, Pierre Bonnard, JW Waterhouse, Nikolai Astrup, and others.
The Eclectic Light Company 