Arbor una nobilis: A selling exhibition of tree paintings by Rupert Shrive

1 - 15 May 2021
Rupert Shrive, Petrol Station Ficus 3 (Rain), 2020, Oil on linen, 51 1/8 x 38 1/4 in, 130 x 97 cm, £7,570
Rupert Shrive, Petrol Station Ficus 3 (Rain), 2020, Oil on linen, 51 1/8 x 38 1/4 in, 130 x 97 cm, £7,570

Over the last few years, a recurring subject of Rupert Shrive's painting has been a pair of fig trees in the Spanish city of Valencia where the artist has previously lived. While Shrive's practice revolves primarily around abstracting human form, these tree compositions have a life of their own - full of character and thematic importance, they evoke the full figurative power of Shrive's style. 

 

As part of this mini selling exhibition of Shrive's paintings of trees, Arbor una nobilis, we are very grateful to writer Christopher Howse (author of Soho in the Eighties and The Train in Spain) who has contributed an essay on the topic of this body of work, which is published below. 

 

For prices and further information, please click on the artworks featured below and/or get in touch with nick@creanandcompany.com.

 

Crean & Company

  • Arbor una nobilis

    by Christopher Howse

    The fig trees that Rupert Shrive returned to over a period of months are a pair in the middle of Valencia. We see their remarkably wide involuted buttressed trunks and the bare ground that their evergreen leaves overshadow. In the background a common petrol station is visible, with the barred and balconied windows of an anonymous building and a lamp-post that by their style confirm the setting as the Levante of Spain. The trees have their own history.

  • These figs are evergreen because they are Ficus macrophylla, which grow elephantine and spread by planting their aerial roots. They thrive in Spain if left in peace, particularly in maritime locations. I’ve been impressed by specimens in Cadiz, Malaga and Cartagena. The danger for these two in Valencia, as Shrive explains, is that their roots might pierce an underground petrol tank and the trees be poisoned.

     

    Trees are at the heart of Western culture even when we turn them into houses, halls or arks. The tree in Christian art is the Cross, the antidote, as it were, to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, through which mankind lost the paradise of Eden. The Cross is arbor una nobilis, the noblest tree, in the words of the 6th-century lyric by Venantius Fortunatus that is still sung each Easter time.

  • The Cross as an individual tree is nowhere more arrestingly explored than in the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood, in which the Cross speaks, describing its felling in the wood and how it felt it could itself have felled all the foes of Christ, but had to stand firm as he was nailed there to it. What species of tree that Cross was had not been a question about which painters seemed much to care. It wasn’t as though they were ignorant of the different forms of tree and leaf, as the 13th-century carved leaves in the chapter house of Southwell prove. 

     

    But medieval trees are often painted as curly vegetative forms, emblems of trees, not anatomical drawings. 

  • The mythical power of trees is not restricted to Christian connections. Yggdrasil, the world tree, may not feature in our daily thoughts, but we are happy to think that some ancient oak in Windsor Forest might be connected with the shadowy figure of Herne the Hunter, as Shakespeare hinted. His was a Romantic deployment of a mythical element.

     

    Romantic art developed a twin enterprise. As painters became more interested in depicting trees as particular species, so they began to paint them as individuals. There were portraits of trees. 

  • When John Sell Cotman painted A Spanish Chestnut Struck by Lightning, around 1810, it mattered that its blasted wood should be of this kind of tree and that this individual tree should tower over a human figure on a country road.

     

    For Constable, getting to know a particular tree led him to paint the trunk of a living elm in Hampstead. The painting (now in the V&A) was made around 1821, when his reputation was growing and his third child was born. The tree bark is tactile, with those rough, rectangular wooden scales that were so familiar to the touch before Dutch elm disease robbed the English horizon of elms’ immemorial silhouettes. “I have seen him admire a fine tree with an ecstasy of delight,” wrote Constable’s friend and first biographer C R Leslie, “like that with which he would catch up a beautiful child in his arms.”

  • When Lucian Freud was choosing works by Constable for an exhibition in Paris in 2002 he decided to make an etching of this study of an elm trunk, which he had known since he was a student. Freud cut straight through the devaluation of Constable as a bourgeois realist. “In Constable there is no false feeling,” he declared. Transposed onto Constable’s canvas, by one interpretation, is a precise moment of intense experience. 

     

    That, I think, is to leave out the biography, as it were, of the object in the world. A tree is long-lived. It stands as a witness to what has passed: sunrises and waxing moons, leaf-fall and untwisting buds. For the tree, what humankind does by way of wars and construction around it must be secondary, unless they come into conflict. Both humans and trees are part of nature, as are gall wasps and magpies. It’s just that human beings sometimes think they run the show, rather than being fellow actors in the natural world. That is not to say that objects rendered in paint cannot express intuitions impossible to express in words. 

  • Rupert Shrive had long admired Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627), the pioneer of “mystical” Spanish still life painting. It must be true to say that the mystical dimension in these still lifes is the thing itself. It is a kind of thing – a lemon or a cardoon – but it is this very thing, an individual. That is the “thisness” so important to the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the haecceitas which he found in the philosopher Duns Scotus. As he put it in the sonnet “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”, each thing does the same: “myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is me: for that I came.”

  • During lockdown, Shrive painted an ash sapling in Montmartre that possessed superlatively the nature of an ash, and was also this particular ash forcing its way through the side of the pavement. Recently too he has painted a study of an Italian alder twig with lichen which is reminiscent of Ruskin’s oak leaf spray on a blue ground, painted in two hours in 1879. Susan Beever, a friend who sat with Ruskin while he worked, said that he did not speak during that time. He was making. In Modern Painters, Ruskin wrote that: “If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world.”

  • A tree is an organic unity of majestic scale that may have 100,000 leaves and branches and twigs 10 miles in length, as Tom Pakenham noted in his Meetings with Remarkable Trees. That book came out in 1996. I had then already been struck by the first painting I’d seen by Rupert Shrive. I saw it in a house in Spain and it depicted trees, junipers, if I'm not mistaken. I was taken by them because they seemed to have something to say. So do these massive, living, exotic fig trees.

     

    With thanks to Christopher Howse, author of Soho in the Eighties and The Train in Spain.