Trees in 19c British & American Art by Professor Christiana Payne
16 January 2020
Report by Will Vaughan

Christiana Payne, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford Brookes University, has had a distinguished career researching British landscape art and genre painting of the nineteenth century. In recent years she has been exploring the representation of trees and the significance that they had for artists and amateurs in the period. Her recent book, Silent Witnesses; Trees in British Art 1760-1870, focussed on the work of British Artists, but in this lecture she extended the theme to cover American artists of the period as well.Perhaps it was as a reaction to the growing urbanization caused by the Industrial Revolution that artists in the late eighteenth century became increasingly involved in representing the natural world. Trees particularly