Chiaroscuro: The Impressionists’ Olive Trees
IN EUROPE THE PRESENCE OF OLIVE TREES defines the Mediterranean region, with its unique climate and intense light. The line enclosing the area where the tree will prosper closely follows the contour joining places with a mean February temperature of 7 °C (45 °F). It passes through central Spain, southern France, the Italian lowlands, southern Greece and the islands, the Middle East and back through northern Tunisia and Morocco. It also marks the boundary of southern, ‘Latinate’ landscapes. To cross over the olive line, as many travellers and painters did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is to pass from the bright and sappy greens of the deciduous north to the silvers and grey-greens of the south. Olives, massed in groves, are the top layer of this colour shift, overlaying the rosemary and cistus and lavender of the garrigue, and the overall tonal change is a consequence of adaptations in plant anatomy. The Mediterranean climate is typified by hot, dry summers and mild, moist winters. Conservation of water is an imperative for all plants. Many species are evergreen and can continue photosynthesising through the cooler months. Their leathery and resinous leaf surfaces act like oilskins, reducing water evaporation. Grey and silvery tones are usually due to dense hairs, which have the same effect. Olives employ both devices, having leaves with blue-green upper surfaces and grey-haired undersides. In windy conditions the leaves close slightly, protecting the transpiring upper surfaces from drying out. Even in a breeze olive trees seem to shimmer in alternations of green and blue and silver, the undersides of the leaves showing matt grey, and the angled, resinous upper surfaces reflecting the sun in flashes of burnished bronze. The leaves themselves are rigidly fixed to the branches, but these are as flexible as willows so that as they move their shadows flicker through the interior of the tree in a show of natural chiaroscuro.
If the olive’s fruit and oil are the Mediterranean’s great gifts to world cuisine, its foliage has helped shape modern Europe’s visual sense. In his 1934 essay ‘The Olive Tree’ Aldous Huxley calls it ‘the painter’s own tree’ and suggests that it defines and shapes the look of the south:
The olive tree is, so to speak, the complement of the oak; and the bright hard-edged landscape in which it figures are the necessary correctives of those gauzy and indeterminate lovelinesses of the English scene. Under a polished sky the olives state their case without the qualifications of mist, of shifting lights, of atmospheric perspective, which give to English landscapes their subtle and melancholy beauty.
The first detailed painting of the leaves in eighteenth-century botanical art was by the young Austrian artist Ferdinand Bauer (Franz’s brother). He had travelled to the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the eighteenth century with John Sibthorp, Professor of Botany at Oxford. Their project was to create a sumptuous Flora Graeca, a Mediterranean corollary of the extravagant tropical floras of the colonial era. (Only twenty-five copies were finally published in 1840, at a colossal price, but the whole venture helped open up the plant life and landscapes of the region.) Bauer’s olive leaves are painted in watercolour. There are just two, partially overlaying each other, the top one showing its pale silvery underside, the lower its dark green upper surface. They are exact and far from impressionistic, but they understand the trick olives play with light and which would help change the whole direction of painting nearly a century later.
Cézanne painted them first, posing brooding olives in the foreground of his obsessive pictures of Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence. Van Gogh, desperate to ‘feel the whole of the country’ (‘isn’t that what distinguishes a Cézanne from anything else?’), travelled south in 1889, and wrote to his brother: ‘Ah, my dear Theo, if you could see the olives at this moment … The old silver foliage and the silver-green against the blue. And the orange-hued turned earth. They are totally different from what one thinks in the north … The murmuring of an olive grove has something very intimate, immensely old. It is too beautiful for me to try to conceive of it or dare to paint it.’ But dare he did, and in the late autumn painted four large canvases, one after the other, in which the olives are shown at different times of day, in different moods, against different vistas. ‘He painted them,’ his biographers write, ‘with their emerald foliage flaming like cypresses, and with their silvery under-leaves sparkling like stars.’ He created a total of eighteen olive canvases in his life. Renoir, too, was transfixed by the light on olive foliage. ‘It sparkles like diamonds,’ he wrote in his journal one afternoon. ‘It is pink, it is blue, and the sky that plays across them is enough to drive you mad.’ Huxley, writing fifty years later, believed he could see how the Provence olives helped give birth to Impressionism. The tree ‘sits lightly on the earth and its foliage is never completely opaque. There is always air between the thin grey and silver leaves … always the flash of light within its shadows’ and Van Gogh’s blues and Renoir’s pinks too, despite the fact that ‘no olive has ever shown a trace of any colour warmer than the faint ochre of withering leaves and summer dusts’.
I have a modern watercolour of an olive grove in Extremadura in central Spain, by my late friend David Measures. It’s post-Impressionist in a literal sense, and rather abstract in its use of colour. The olive trunks are striped with turquoise and jade. The foliage picks up flecks of orange and pure white. I went to stay at the farm where it was painted one spring and saw that the colours weren’t abstract at all. Their random fluttering picked up colours from elsewhere in the grove, the scarlet poppies growing beneath the trees, the rufous plumage of feeding hoopoes, scraps of burnished sky. Reflected off the silver leaves, they left an afterglow in the eyes.
Renoir bought his own olive grove in 1907. He was sixty-six years old and severely arthritic, and had taken to spending the winters in Provence. In 1904 he discovered Les Collettes, a rundown farm in Cagnes with an ancient olive grove attached to it. He learned from a villager that the widow who owned the property had been made an offer by a nurseryman, who wanted to use the land for raising carnations, a development that would have doomed the grove. According to his son, Renoir thought the olives ‘the most beautiful trees he had ever seen’, and couldn’t contemplate their destruction. So he bought the land, originally intending to leave it untouched as a kind heritage site. But his wife Aline insisted that they should build a house there. They moved in and began creating a large and elaborate garden in 1908, and his time there contributed to what is called his ‘iridescent period’.
The olives were central characters in this. Their apparent ability to create and scatter patches of illumination made them bespoke trees for the Impressionists, who had abandoned palettes developed for studios where the light was static and came from one direction. Renoir saw the trees as a challenge as well as an inspiration, and understood their legerdemain with light. ‘The olive tree!’ he wrote. ‘What a brute! If you realised how much trouble it has caused me! A tree full of colours. Not great at all. How all those little leaves make me sweat! A gust of wind and my tree’s tonality changes. The colour isn’t on the leaves, but in the spaces between them.’ But he loved their capriciousness. He had a wooden studio with a corrugated-iron roof built amongst the trees, like an exotic garden shed. He liked to pose his nude models on the grass outside, with the sun filtering through the silvery olive branches and dappling their flesh.
The olives (and the garden) are still there at the house at Cagnes, which is now a museum. It’s believed that some of the trees were planted by François I, who wanted something to keep his troops occupied during a truce in an early sixteenth-century war. But some of them have the size and archaic weathering of trees known to be 1,000 years old. Unpruned for more than a century, they are untypically tall. The roots have the pitted texture of pumice stone. All of them will have been through Provence’s great frost of 1709, which killed many trees down to ground level. A record of the frost remains in their grain pattern – as it does in their branching. The oldest of Renoir’s olives have the tortuous growths of all ancient natural survivors: bosses of scar tissue where limbs have been lost, redundant branches wrapped around and almost fused with the trunk, crooks, dog legs, buttresses. The slow ageing of the wood into something resembling the limestone of the Provençal hills anchors the capriciousness of the foliage.
Old and characterful olives are becoming increasingly scarce in the Mediterranean. Renoir saved his grove from clearance for a market garden. Thirty years later Aldous Huxley reported the widespread destruction of olive orchards because peanut oil was in the ascendant. Now, in addition to being cleared for more productive modern varieties, ancient olive trees are being dug up and transplanted to the vanity gardens of rich northern Europeans. Not many survive the trauma, or tolerate their new homes. Those that do are admired as curiosities, but will never have the bright sun of the south flickering through their leaves.
The olive’s wild ancestor, the oleaster, and all its shiny leaved, aromatic, brilliantly flowered companions in the Mediterranean scrublands have, for me, become the exotic vegetation of my life. I don’t have the right temperament to be a tropical adventurer, so the Mediterranean flora’s serendipitous mix of familiarity and strangeness has been a compensation. And there can’t be much doubt that this belt of dazzling species – wild tulips, irises, crocuses, peonies, scented sweeps of lavenders, thymes, marjorams, chromatic shrubberies of broom, spurge, cistus, stretching from the Middle East to Iberia – is one of the most beautiful and fragrant plantscapes on earth. A good proportion of our favourite garden flowers have their wild ancestors here. But for me it has the additional thrill of being a dynamic vegetation. For a long while it was believed this was a ‘Ruined Landscape’, the degenerate remains of some ancient and majestic forest, lost to human plunder. This was a typical anthropocentric myth. The scrubland – the garrigue, as it is called in France – has been there for millions of years. It is a vegetation which has evolved to cope with the environmental challenges of the Mediterranean zone – fire, drought, thin soils, grazing – and its many thousands of species continue to develop, and to find ways of living on vertical cliffs, inside caves, to regenerate from burned stumps, to flower in February snows and then again in the mists of autumn. Perhaps, out of respect for its grace and provenance and majestic inventiveness, we should call it Classical vegetation.