TREES IN MODERN PAINTING 229 



landscapes will give pleasure to all but the 

 exactingly realistic critic to whom facts are 

 everything and "motives of feeling and colour " 

 and ''profound sense of sylvan beauty and 

 majesty " quite secondary matters. One need 

 not be a botanist to see that Gainsborough's 

 trees are lacking in individual character. We 

 get the same kind of tree throughout the picture, 

 only varied a little in form, and as Redgrave 

 more than hints, it is well not to inquire too 

 closely into its identity. But the painter does 

 take us into the English woodland, we are amid 

 undergrowth beneath the shade of trees ; and 

 between their stems, and above the trees lower 

 down the hill, we see the sunlit valley-fields, 

 and, beyond, the church and houses of the little 

 town, showing through an opening in the trees 

 across the valley, the scene being closed by the 

 opposite well-wooded hill-side. This is what 

 such a picture as the '* View of Dedham" does 

 for us ; and it, and many other landscapes of 

 the same kind from the same hand, often come 

 to mind when we are amid scenes similar to 

 those which Gainsborough painted. In them all 

 there is a pervading feeling of leafiness, and his 

 interest in trees is greater than that of Wilson. 



