Twelve famous forest paintings, from Albrecht Altdorfer's Saint George in the Forest of 1510 to Henri Rousseau's lion in a jungle, nearly four centuries later, show how painters learned to put the viewer inside a wood. The list counts down from 12 to 1.
Behind some of these woods sits a story that has little to do with trees. On one canvas, a second signature has nearly vanished from the forest floor, and nobody agrees on who rubbed it away.
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How These Were Chosen
In most landscapes, the horizon gives the distance, a line far off where the land meets the sky. Inside a forest, that line disappears behind the trunks. So painters found depth elsewhere, by overlapping the trees and painting the farthest ones paler and bluer, the way distant hills look through air.
Leaves raised a second problem. A single wood holds far too many to paint one by one, so each painter on this list had to find a shorthand for them: a curl, a dab or a patch of color.
A wood also decides where the viewer stands. A path, a stream or a gap of light either keeps the eye at the edge of the trees or leads it deep inside, a choice an open view never asks for.
To make this list, the trees had to fill most of the canvas. A figure or an animal could stay, but a forest standing behind a picnic or a portrait was left out.
Two groups stand out. Three pictures come from the forest of Fontainebleau, an old royal hunting ground near Paris: Cézanne's rocks, Théodore Rousseau's winter sunset and Corot's clearing. Three others come from Russia, from the shows of the Wanderers, a society of Russian painters who took their exhibitions from city to city.
12. Ivan Shishkin, Wood Distances (1884)
From a high meadow strewn with gray stones and low bushes, a Russian forest spreads for miles and runs out at a sheet of water on the horizon. A pale, cloudy sky takes almost half the canvas.
Ivan Shishkin, the great painter of Russian forests, made this view in 1884 and called it Lesnye dali, "forest distances," known in English as Wood Distances. No single spot looks quite like it.
He probably combined two places he knew well. One was Yelabuga, his hometown on the Kama River, a tributary of the Volga in central Russia. The other was the country around Siverskaya, a railway station outside St. Petersburg where he spent his summers in the early 1880s.
The width of the canvas worried Shishkin before it was even hung. He sent it to the twelfth show of the Wanderers and asked Pavel Bryullov, a fellow member who ran the show, to give it a good place. The wall he got disappointed him, and he complained that the picture was hanging "very unfavorably."
A wide landscape needs room in front of it. The woods cross the canvas in one long sweep, and a viewer has to stand well back to take them all in.
From there, the picture opens in layers, one behind the other. First come the stones and bushes of the meadow, then a line of dark pines, then the treetops beyond them, and last the low hills and the water.
A critic of the time praised exactly that depth, the far woods under a light haze. He called the canvas a panorama of ordinary Russian nature, "with its beauties that do not strike the eye."
The scale comes from a single tree. A thin pine stands alone on the right, close to the viewer and taller than anything else. Next to its bare trunk, whole woods on the horizon look no thicker than a flat band of grayish green.
At a Glance
Artist: Ivan Shishkin (1832 to 1898)
Painted: 1884
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 112.8 × 164 cm (44 × 65 in)
Where to see it: State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
11. Caspar David Friedrich, The Chasseur in the Forest (about 1813)
Only a gold helmet catches the light in this snowy clearing. It sits on the head of a lone soldier in a blue cape, seen from behind, his saber hanging low. In front of him stands a wall of tall spruces with no path into it, and behind him a raven perches on a sawn stump.
The picture is known today as The Chasseur in the Forest. Who this soldier is, and why the painter left him alone in the snow, goes back to 1813, the year Napoleon's army occupied the city where it was painted.