Designing with The Tree

This is a picture for a room with plain walls and warm light. In a study or reading nook, hung so the crown sits at eye level when seated, the greens deepen against plaster or clay-colored paint and the black lines sharpen in lamplight. The smaller size suits a narrow wall above a desk or a pair of shelves, where the trunk reads clearly from across the room. The larger size can carry a hallway or the wall beside a bed, holding its own without company. It pairs well with linen, dark wood and unbleached paper tones, and it asks for nothing else on the wall around it.

Valadon Drew the Tree First

Start at the trunk. It enters from the bottom edge and climbs slightly off centre, its bark built from short umber strokes. The eye lands there before anything else. From the trunk the branches flex outward, each one ringed in heavy black line, and the foliage sits behind them as deep green mass rather than leaf-by-leaf detail. What holds the composition is the space between. Pale garden wall shows through the crown in flat, unbroken passages, and those gaps do the work a sky would do. The tree reads as a drawn figure against quiet ground, muscular and deliberate, its silhouette carrying the whole picture.

Valadon came to painting from drawing, and from a life spent modelling for the painters of Montmartre before picking up the brush herself. She exhibited with the Société des Artistes Indépendants in the 1890s and built a career outside the academy. Her subjects were blunt and close to hand, nudes, interiors, the views from her windows, cats, flowers, her garden at Saint-Bernard. She drew in strong contour and painted in saturated, unapologetic color. The Tree belongs to that late flowering of still-life and garden subjects, where she treated plants with the same physical presence she gave the human body.

Contour and Color After Impressionism

By the 1920s the Impressionist dissolve had worn thin. Painters across France were pulling line back into their work, borrowing structure from Cézanne and a certain deliberate roughness from the Nabis and from Gauguin before them. Valadon stood in this current without belonging to any school. She kept the broken color and open air of her generation but refused its softness, drawing her forms in black the way a woodcut artist would. The result sits between Post-Impressionism and a kind of naïve directness, painting that admits it is made of strokes and outlines and does not apologize for it.

What keeps attention here is the tension between drawing and filling. The black contour does one job, the green masses another, and the pale wall behind does a third. Nothing blends. At a glance the image is simple, a tree against a wall. Stay with it and the rhythm of the branches takes over, each limb angled differently, the negative spaces shifting shape as you move. That kind of picture changes with the light in a room and never quite finishes explaining itself, which is exactly what a daily companion on a wall should do.

How the Composition Holds the Eye

The Black Contour

At arm's length the outlines read as confident, slightly irregular strokes, thicker at the joints of the branches and thinner along the trunk. They are not traced, they are drawn, and the small hesitations in them give the tree its character. The black also flattens the picture just enough. The tree becomes a shape before it becomes a botanical subject, and that shape is what registers across a room.

Foliage as Mass

Valadon does not paint leaves. She paints masses of viridian and sap green pressed together in broad patches, with warmer ochre breaking through where the light would fall. Up close the color sits thick and the edges of each mass are hard, cut against the pale wall. The effect is weight without fuss. The crown reads as one dense green body, rooted and heavy, exactly as a tree feels from below.

The Quiet Ground

The garden wall behind the crown is the least worked passage in the picture and the most important. It is pale, flat and nearly empty, and it gives the black lines and deep greens somewhere to sit. Because the ground stays calm, the eye keeps returning to the trunk and branches instead of wandering off the edge. That restraint is what makes the image restful at a distance.

More Works by Suzanne Valadon

Further works by Suzanne Valadon in the Auvrique collection.

Suzanne Valadon

Portrait of Bernard Lemaire's Mother

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Suzanne Valadon

Portrait of Bernard Lemaire's Mother

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Suzanne Valadon

Bouquet of Flowers in a Pitcher

View edition

Suzanne Valadon

Bouquet of Flowers in a Pitcher

View edition

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