Alexandre Calame, 'Four Large Trees', before 1850

In this study four trees, probably oaks, progress diagonally into the landscape, establishing a rhythm across the picture surface. A pool of sunlight illuminates the ground, with patches of light catching the branches. Leafless branches poke through the foliage, dramatic in their angularity. From the 1830s onwards, Calame regularly painted and drew trees, whether in groups or individual specimens. Making these studies was part of a landscape artist’s practice and training and considered the equivalent of working from the life model. A tree’s trunk, bark and foliage were studied with the same accuracy as the anatomy of a human figure. Calame was particularly known for his painstaking attention to a tree’s foliage. His biographer Eugène Rambert listed Calame’s skill in depicting the leaves of a variety of trees in order to refute a malicious claim that the artist painted just three types, the beech, oak and fir, because he supposedly only owned brushes suitable to paint the foliage of these particular trees.

The scene was almost certainly painted in Switzerland. The composition is unusual in Calame’s work, but the trees’ placement anticipates the artist’s studies of maritime pines painted during trips to the south of France in the 1850s.