Autumn, grand despoiler of beauty, and truth-teller
PAUL JOHNSON
So autumn has come again, with her blushing and animating hand, searing and spotting, tinting and flaming, making hectic and encrimsoning, concealing decay, death and coming annihilation behind a mesmerising anarchy of colour. I have been out painting, down in Somerset, trying to get down on my oblongs of Whatman the blazing furnaces of reds, yellows and golds in my garden, beyond it and beyond the place where the indigenous fowl — geese, ducks and chickens mostly — fend off the rooks which raid their food from the darkening sky, a line of gilded birches glitter fantastical against the dark green fields. Autumn does not last: there is one perfect day when the entire chromatic symphony strikes a note of angelic harmony, with the sky a perfect eggshell blue if you are lucky, and you must grab that one day and paint furiously before the winds strike a hideous discord and blow away the enchantment.
The more I age, the more I like and respect trees, which grow old gracefully and acquire the wisdom which eludes us — me anyway. As the winds come, they spread their branches with the confidence born of many winters of survival, and dig their roots deeper into the soil. They do not mind losing the leaves, mere outer garments, as ephemeral as the Paris fashions when great masters like Dior and Balenciaga manipulated them with dismissive insolence. The leaves are the mere dividends of the seasons, sprouting from the permanent capital of wood and pulp, the inner guard and unguents beneath the bark, itself inviolable against the weather and protecting all within. It is good to draw trees when they are losing or have lost their leaves — bare ruin'd choirs. as Shakespeare says — for then their wooden architecture stands out naked in all its relentless logic and system, infinitely complex yet also massively simple, like the majestic columns and arches of Exeter, whose interior is the finest and warmest of any mediaeval cathedral — the Sistine Chapel of Gothic. Without their leaves to clothe and confuse, trees acquire their true Nisual character and tell you their life stories: where they shot up, supreme and confident in their youth, when they took their first determinative bend, when they bifurcated, perhaps foolishly, for climatic reasons which seemed good at the time, when they decided to push upward on another main trunk, where they lost a valuable but suspect limb in a terrible December storm —
good riddance, the tap-trunk said — and where a foolish woodman lopped off a perfectly sound branch, like the wicked Hyde Park rangers who took away the big lower branches of the five enormous horse chestnuts that guard the northern entrance to Kensington Gardens, and so destroyed their perfect natural symmetry.
A fashionable woman told me not long ago, 'I spend a vast amount of money and, much more important, one third of my time making myself look beautiful: with trainers, dentists, cosmetic surgeons, hairdressers, beauticians, dieticians, dressmakers and all the rest of them — some angels and real experts; some frauds, all greedily chipping away at my private time. And then, the moment I captivate a man, which presumably is the object of the whole operation, I face the prospect of taking it all off and being my own bare, unpainted, tousled self, naked and, I must confess, by no means unashamed. What a bloody waste!' (as John Osborne said when he died just after having £20,000 of work done on his teeth: his last words, apparently). Leaves are the haute couture and cosmetics of trees en grande toilette. Better without such frippery, you say? No: let's not go too far. The spring shoots, the summer foliage and autumn tinting of trees are part of their glorious virtuosity and to be valued and enjoyed in due season. But the wood is the body of the tree, its bones and machinery, its life-system, its essence.
Time was when I found trees hard to draw and paint because I did so in the summer, mainly. It was only when I started to study trees systematically and draw them in winter that I made real progress. That was why Direr was so good at trees, and Rubens and that weird mad Danish-German C.D. Friedrich. Turner drew trees attentively in his youth and was good at them. Later he stopped bothering, partly because he hated using green — 'Can't afford it! Can't afford it!' he would say, and it's true that a mass of green in a painting is hard to handle. A really ingenious man like Peter de Wint got round the green problem by doing his trees every other colour or combination except green. I have learnt a lot by studying his watercolours of trees and copying his tricks. (All painting is trickery, and bound to be.) Constable was both good and had at trees; best when he was just drawing them carefully and putting in a little wash. One thing I have discovered: with trees there are no short cuts; you cannot get away with faking any more than you can with human beings. A wood is like a crowd: you have to put in some individual faces and bodies at least. One criticism I had of the recent exhibition of Russian landscape painting at the National Gallery (in other respects the best show this year) is that Russians, being by instinct communal, as Tolstoy gasped so well, tend to be undifferential when painting trees together. Endless Russian birch forests can look like a piece of nature's mass production, and you have to remind yourself that each tree, one of ten million in Siberia, has its own personality and life-history. No two trees are identical. On the contrary, the closer you look, the more fundamental differences appear, as well as countless superficial ones.
One comes to believe, though it is in fact heresy, that trees are more important than human beings, certainly more likeable. They are usually much older and avuncular. So Thomas Browne, in Urn Burial, that depository of sense and verbal gold, reminds us, 'Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks.' As the judge Sir Ranulphe Crewe bawled out in court in the Oxford Peerage Case, 1625, 'And yet, time hath his revolution. There must be a period and an end to all temporal things, an end of names and dignities and whatsoever is terrene; and why not of De Vere? For where is Bohun? Where's Mowbray, where's Mortimer? Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality.' And, one might add, where's Tudor, where's Stuart, where's Hanover? Yet there are trees standing in the California groves of giants which were trees already when the first Plantagenet came to the throne.
I shall go on drawing and painting these strong and venerable works of nature. They are piling up in my studio. I painted a dozen large watercolours in September alone, mostly trees, by the side of Lake Como. What to do with them? I am thinking of holding a joint exhibition with Thomas Pakenham. He has published two magnificent volumes about trees all over the world, and has become truly expert — and poetic — at photographing them. A show of his photos and my watercolours might be fun, might it not? Meanwhile, through the windows of my library, where I write, I see the trees of the street and in my garden, stirring in the chill breeze and shedding their garments. 0 Autumn, grand despoiler and truth-teller!
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