EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Trees as Paintbrushes

Looking out my study window in Italy something struck me that you might only notice in life not paint. Not far from the house, lower down, is a row of cypresses. When the wind blows, the pointed tops move back and forth over the distant landscape which, of course, remains quite still, unmoved. You can see what happens in this short video clip. It is that movement over a stable scene that makes them resemble long, thin paintbrushes moving back and forth over a landscape in the process of being painted. Such an image, once seen that way, sticks. More likely, perhaps, in a painter's mind than ours.

Trees are visual metaphors for an artist's brushes are explained as such in entries on Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection (c.1458), Rembrandt's Three Trees (1643) and his Landscape with a Stone Bridge (1638), Monet's Camille Monet in the Garden at Argenteuil (1876) and Van Gogh's Cypresses with Two Female Figures (1889). However, there are hundreds more including Leonardo's Annunciation (c. 1472-5) in the Uffizi and Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Cypresses (c.1889), both illustrated above.