“The Ravages of the Axe”: The Meaning of the Tree Stump in Nineteenth-Century American Art

Abstract

Throughout most of the nineteenth century and especially after about 1825, when American landscape painting became the primary form of national artistic expression, painters strove to be as articulate as possible about the matters of national and historical purpose that were of such moment to the era. This ambition assumed different forms, but it is always prudent to assume that landscape paintings bear some deliberate charge of meaning, and that their makers used symbols that would make this meaning publicly accessible. Among such symbols are apocalyptic sunsets, autumnal foliage, scenes of untouched wilderness, and even a pronounced horizontal pictorial format, which responds to the nature of American space. The tree stump was also, I believe, employed in American landscapes as a widely understood iconographic device. Although the cut stump appears in European and English art, its frequency and numbers in American art are unique, and it is a special element of American artistic language.1