A tree can outlive several generations of painters without moving an inch. Some of the trees on this list were famous in their own towns long before anyone painted them. Others now survive only on canvas, after floods and lightning took them, and one row stayed up a few months longer only because a painter paid to delay the felling.
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How These Were Chosen
Of all landscape subjects, a tree comes closest to a sitter. It changes with every season, and wind, age and the axe give each one a shape that no other tree shares, so a single oak can be painted the way a face is.
A tree also gives a painter lines to build with. One trunk can hold up a whole composition, and bare branches can be drawn almost like handwriting.
The rule for this list is that the tree is the subject, never the backdrop. Most of these trees were real, and several can still be placed in a village or a garden. The countdown runs from the least known, at number 12, to the best known, at number 1.
12. Utagawa Hiroshige, Plum Park in Kameido (1857)
One plum branch crosses this print like a bar, thick, dark and loaded with white blossom, and far behind it small figures sit at a teahouse. The rest of the tree does not fit on the sheet. Utagawa Hiroshige designed the print in 1857, a year before his death, for his series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, the old name of Tokyo.
The tree he cropped so hard was famous in its own right. Its branches crept along the ground like a dragon, so people called it the Garyūbai, the Sleeping Dragon Plum. It grew near the Kameido Tenjin Shrine, in a garden of about 300 plum trees, and accounts of the time said it bloomed so white that it drove off the darkness.
A buyer in Edo would have expected to see that dragon. Hiroshige shows almost none of it. He keeps one branch and lets it block most of the garden, so the tea drinkers stay on the far side, and the gap between the branch up close and the teahouse far off makes the garden look much deeper than the paper allows.
That way of cutting a tree later reached Europe. In 1887, in Paris, Vincent van Gogh copied the print in oil. He kept the cropped branch, turned its black and gray trunk red and blue, and added orange borders filled with Japanese characters. His own trees, painted in Provence, are numbers 3 and 2.
The Sleeping Dragon itself did not last. In 1910, a flood after heavy rains withered every plum tree in the garden, the famous one among them.
At a Glance
Artist: Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858)
Printed: 1857 (11th month), No. 30 in the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
Medium: Color woodblock print
Size: 34 × 22.6 cm (13 3/8 × 8 7/8 in), image only
Where to see it: Brooklyn Museum, New York. Another impression at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
11. Jacob van Ruisdael, The Great Oak (1652)
A huge oak stands on a rise where two roads meet, its upper branches snapped and bare. Travelers pass beneath it on horseback and on foot, and bones lie scattered in the road. Jacob van Ruisdael, a painter from Haarlem in his early twenties, could have chosen a tree in its prime. In 1652 he chose one already half destroyed, and set it where every traveler had to pass under it.