The Tree and the Stump: Hieroglyphics of the Sacred Forest

During the early romantic period, American artists gradually learned the symbolic language of trees a language they have never since abandoned. The early romantics employed the symbolism of trees to create the text of a national landscape. As both signs in space and icons of the sacred grove, trees located heaven in perspective. Informed over time by the aesthetics of romanticism, realism, and abstraction, the grammar of trees was transformed, but not the symbolism. In time the art of nature and the nature of art conjoined to define the American arboreal lexicon. The first American artists seem to have had difficulty seeing the woods for the trees. Their art, still informed by the classical tradition, could not easily subsume the trackless forest-a "tangled maze" beyond village and studio. They occasionally used individual trees as useful and wellbehaved pictorial props-the enframing motifs of picturesque convention but could not seem to transform the intractable wilderness into scenery. For the public the forest was even less manageable. Throughout our early history the forest, both as fact and symbol, was experienced as a material and moral wilderness, a barrier to civilization and virtue. Shocked contemporary European observers saw the central metaphors for American attitudes and behavior toward the fiend-filled forest as warfare and tempest.1 The first stirrings of romanticism on this continent prompted artists to begin seeing the landscape in a different way. For psychological as well as cultural reasons, a new set