Bands of Black and Sap Green

The Carved Trunk

Each trunk is built from alternating bands, light against dark, the way grain runs through cut timber. At arm's length you can see the edges of those bands, hard and unblended. This is sculptor's logic applied to colour. The trunks feel chiselled rather than painted, and the effect survives enlargement without softening.

Colour Without Depth

There is no aerial perspective here, no fading blue at the horizon. Sap green does all the spatial work, darkening where the wood thickens and lightening where light drops through. The picture stays a surface, and that refusal of depth is what keeps it modern a century on. It sits on a wall as a colour field.

The Closed Canopy

The top of the image is where the composition seals itself. Branches knit together and cut off the sky, so the verticals have nowhere to escape. Your eye climbs, meets the canopy, and returns to the trunks. That loop is deliberate and it is why the picture reads well from across a room as well as up close.

A Sculptor Working in Flat Colour

The Nabis worked in Paris in the 1890s around Gauguin's example, flattening form and letting colour carry the meaning. They painted screens, panels and decorations meant to live in interiors rather than galleries. Lacombe took that programme further than most. Trained as a sculptor, he thought in relief and in cut surfaces, so his landscapes read as carved planes rather than views. A forest became a rhythm of bands. A field became a colour decision. This was decoration in the serious sense, art built for a wall and a room.

What holds attention is the discipline of it. Two colours, one direction, no depth cue anywhere. The longer you look, the more the bands separate into individual trunks and the flatter picture turns back into a real wood. That slow shift is the reward. It does not exhaust itself in a week. Each evening the eye finds the trunks again, and the picture gives back exactly as much looking as you bring to it.

In the Forest, Seen at Scale

The eye enters low and climbs. Sap green undergrowth first, then the trunks, cut into flat bands of black and green, rising until the canopy closes the top of the picture. Nothing recedes. Lacombe flattens the forest into verticals, and at this size the verticals do what tree trunks do in person. They push forward. You stand in front of it and the room behind you stops mattering for a moment.

Lacombe was the Nabi sculptor, the one who worked wood with his hands. His friends called him the Nabi sculptor outright, and the carving shows. He treated the forest the way he treated a block of timber, as material to be cut rather than scenery to be described. This image belongs to his woodcut work of the 1890s, when the Nabis were stripping landscape down to pattern and colour.

Designing with In the Forest

This is a piece that wants a wall it can dominate. In a hallway or stair landing it turns a pass-through space into something worth slowing down for. In a study or sitting room, hang it alone above a low sideboard or a bench, centred at eye height, and let the dark greens carry the corner. It sits naturally against warm white, clay or oatmeal walls, and it deepens a room with walnut or blackened oak furniture. The smaller size suits a narrow wall or a pair position above a console. The larger one holds a main wall by itself. A single warm spotlight from above brings the green bands forward after dark.

For a closer look at how Georges Lacombe handled this elsewhere, see The Violet Wave and In the Forest.