CHAPTER VII 



TREES IN PAINTING: TO THE BEGINNING 

 OF MODERN ART 



WE have contemporary evidence, found 

 in the caves which were the dwell- 

 ings of the earliest men of whom we have any 

 knowledge, that, so far back, delight was taken 

 by man in pictorial representation of the living 

 creatures about him. These early essays in art 

 were in the form of sculpture, and, therefore, 

 in the history of art, sculpture precedes paint- 

 ing. The men of the Old Stone Age knew 

 how both to carve in the round and to figure 

 with incised lines on stone and Ivory and bone, 

 the forms of the animals that they hunted, and 

 of themselves when engaged in the chase. So 

 early, also, do we find the representation, if 

 not of trees, at least of grass ; for on a frag- 

 ment of ivory found in a cave at La Madelalne, 



in France, a mammoth Is carved, and the long 



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