The Edge of a Forest, Storm Coming On 1826

James Arthur O'Connor (1792–1841)
Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
Tree

Andrew Lawson (b.1945)
Somerville College, University of Oxford
Ash Dome 1987

David Nash (b.1945)
British Council Collection
Tree c.1913

Helen Saunders (1885–1963)
The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)
An Oak in Moccas Park, Herefordshire 19th C

British (English) School
Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
Woodland

Pat Irwin (b.1954)
Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council

When it was announced, in September 2023, that the iconic Sycamore Gap tree next to Hadrian's Wall had been felled in an act of wanton vandalism, the news was greeted with what the National Trust described as an 'unprecedented outpouring of emotion'. The sense of grief and anger felt by so many was a reminder of the often profound relationship many of us have both with our local woods and with 'significant' trees.

The Sycamore Gap tree next to Hadrian's Wall, Northumberland

Now, 'Forest', a new exhibition at Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery, explores that deep and ongoing connection with woodland. At its heart is the museum's iconic, large-scale painting of the Major Oak (1882) by Nottingham-born artist Andrew MacCallum, on display for the first time since 2020.

Major Oak, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

You can find out more about this exhibition on the museum's Bloomberg Connects guide, which includes an audio introduction to the show.

Alongside this important painting are prints, drawings and photographs from the museum's collections, as well as six newly commissioned works created exclusively for the exhibition. A special sound work has also been developed in collaboration with artist Mo Zhou, transporting visitors back 1,000 years when Sherwood Forest lined the Castle walls.

The show explores the ways in which nature and culture have always been – and continue to be – entwined. In a time of ecological crisis, the questions the exhibition poses are more vital than ever before.

Installation view, 'Forest', Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery, 2025

Going back, getting lost

Throughout history, across all cultures, forests have been powerful symbolic sites. Of their appeal, the nature writer Richard Mabey has said:

'I could always lose myself in a wood, not just in its spaces, but in the layers of history bound up in its grain and forkings and slow cycles of light and shade. A wood's aura of history seems to go back not just beyond what generations of humans have done to it, but beyond civilisation altogether. The forest, the wildwood, is the nature we think we have, in both senses, "grown out of", and in woods you have always the feel of "going back". They are places of long memory, and resilience.'

The tree is one of the key cultural symbols. We talk of 'family trees' and explain the mysteries of existence using images such as the 'tree of life' and the 'tree of knowledge'.

Trees and forests, and the people who work with them and live amongst them, are archetypes of our imaginations. Yet the forest is also the source of primitive fears, a place which hides the unknown and the threatening. Countless folktales take us deep into the woods to witness a rite of passage. David Hockney reimagined the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm in a series of six etchings, which includes this wooded landscape.

The forest, then, is a place for transformation and revelation. As Roger Deakin wrote: 'To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically by getting lost.'

This paradox is perhaps why trees and forests have been such fertile sources of inspiration for artists and writers. On one hand, the forest is a place of retreat, of sanctuary, and of regeneration. On the other hand, it is a place of danger, of ghosts and demons. Think, for example, of the proliferation of recent horror films set in the woods.

For an artist or writer, it's a subject which offers a beguiling ambiguity. The artist Max Ernst was both haunted and fascinated by the forest that surrounded his childhood home – it is a motif that appears frequently in his work.

We can identify with the stoicism of an ancient tree, we can see a wood as somewhere that offers the possibility of escape from recent events, but in a tangled thicket, we might also see an equivalent for a confused state of mind. Many paintings of trees and forests depict nature as knotty, impenetrable, unruly and overwhelming – feelings that, in a time of political and social instability, we are all familiar with.

The Major Oak

At the heart of 'Forest' is MacCallum's extraordinary painting of the Major Oak, a legendary tree, more than 1,000 years old, said to have been Robin Hood's hideout. MacCallum's huge painting depicts the tree in winter, its meticulously detailed bare branches silhouetted against a sky that glows with rosy light. In some ways, it feels more like a portrait than a landscape.

An audio on the museum's Bloomberg Connects guide gives some sense of the significance of this tree in the context of Sherwood Forest.

MacCallum's reputation rests mainly on his woodland scenes. He was born in Nottingham and many of his paintings are of the local area. The Blasted Tree is also on display at the Castle.

Oak Trees in Sherwood Forest (1877) is at Manchester Art Gallery and In Sherwood Forest – Winter Evening after Rain (1881) is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire: Winter Evening after Rain

MacCallum's close observation shows the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, but his paintings of solitary trees also recall the work of the German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich. In works such as The Lonely Tree (1820) in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin – which also depicts a solitary oak – or Winter Landscape, in The National Gallery in London, Friedrich encourages us to see these trees as symbols, embodying qualities of spirituality, stoicism, resilience or solitude.

A long tradition

Arguably the high point of British landscape art came between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when artists such as Thomas Gainsborough, John Crome, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable focused their attention on the landscape around them.

Paintings such as Gainsborough's Cornard Wood, near Sudbury, Suffolk (1748) or A Forest Road (1750), are topographically accurate studies of landscape and nature, but also tell us a great deal about land use before and after the enclosures, when common land was appropriated by the landowners. In them, the woods are not only Romantic places for retreat and contemplation but sites of production.

A second great flowering of landscape art in Britain came in the twentieth century, when Neo-Romantic artists such as John Craxton, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Paul Nash and others explored the mythic, psychic qualities of the landscape, the sheer strangeness of dark woods, sequestered lanes and gnarled tree forms. Inspired by the visionary intensity of William Blake and Samuel Palmer's work and the recent development of Surrealism, their paintings were often dark, brooding and nostalgic.

These artists visualised the landscape as ancient and mysterious, a spiritual realm that could reflect the human condition in turbulent times. In Craxton's Dark Landscape, painted during the Second World War, the land is labyrinthine, a spiritual realm that might reflect the human condition in turbulent times.

Significant trees

Since MacCallum painted the Major Oak, one of the oldest trees in Sherwood Forest, it has continued to inspire artists. In 2017, Mat Collishaw made Albion, a ghostly projection of the slowly rotating tree. The work dramatically portrays the thousand-year-old tree's plight, caught in a liminal state between life and decay, both there and not there. We might see in this phantom tree, quietly enduring, something of ourselves.

For 'Forest', artist Caroline Locke was commissioned to also make new work focused on the Major Oak. Locke works with 'significant' ancient trees, using recording equipment to capture data that is made into handbells and tuning forks which emit the tree's sonic signature.

You can find out more about Locke's project in an audio recording on Bloomberg Connects.

To get accurate and scientific data, academics from the University of Nottingham helped the artist by scanning the tree using lasers to produce a three-dimensional scan and model of the tree. As part of this series of projects about notable trees, Locke also collects stories from the public, building into the work the sense of connection people have with 'their' local trees.

Showing 'The Forest Bell' by Caroline Locke

A continuing inspiration

Trees and forests continue to be a rich source of inspiration for contemporary artists, not only for their historic and mythic associations, but because in the twenty-first century they can help us to confront our deeply anthropocentric views of nature and reflect upon new understandings of the interrelationships between humans and our fellow beings, be they animal, insect, fungal, floral or arboreal.

While a generation of artists who first came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, including Richard Long and David Nash, continue to explore what it means to be in the landscape, younger artists as varied as Katie Paterson, Lotte Scott and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, inspired by their example, are forging new forms of Land art that address the climate emergency.

Almost thirty years ago, the historian and arborist Thomas Packenham wrote: 'The indifference towards old trees makes a mockery of our supposed new respect for the environment.' In 2015 a study in the scientific journal Nature estimated that human intervention has been responsible for the loss of 46% of the world's forests. More recently, it has been estimated that if current rates of deforestation continue, there will be no more trees in just 600 years. It is an unimaginable prospect.

Let us hope that the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree and the ensuing anger and grief prove to be a turning point. In the meantime, exhibitions such as 'Forest' allow us to consider how important our woody companions continue to be, both ecologically and culturally.

Ben Tufnell, writer and curator based in London

'Forest' is at Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery until 2nd November 2025

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This content was funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies