This page was made for you. It tells the story of this painting, the remarkable man who made it, the France it belongs to, and the world it came from.
For almost as long as there have been people, there have been old trees that no one could walk past. Cultures all over the world singled out the ancient, twisted ones, the oaks and olives and yews that had stood for centuries, and treated them as something close to holy. They named them. They gathered beneath them. They warned their children never to harm them. An old tree was a landmark, an elder, a living piece of a place's memory.
This painting reaches straight back to that instinct. It does not hand you a landscape with a tree somewhere inside it. It gives you the tree and nothing else, and asks you to really look, the way people once looked at the great old trees of their village. There is something almost reverent in choosing to paint one humble tree with this much attention and this much seriousness.
That is what makes it such a striking thing to live with. It is closer to a companion than a decoration, an old and patient thing standing watch in the corner of your room. A space with a tree like this in it feels a little steadier, and a little more thoughtful, than it did before.
There is a memorial page for the man who painted your tree. Not an art-world listing. A military one, maintained by the memorial to France's Free French paratroopers, because before Marc Delamoriniere was a painter, he was a soldier in one of the most dangerous units of the Second World War.
He was a Parisian, born in the city in 1904. When France fell, he did not stay under occupation. In June 1943 he crossed to Free French forces in North Africa, and from there into the airborne. He earned his parachutist's wings in England at the start of 1944 and was assigned to the elite 3rd SAS, the French special forces regiment. That autumn he jumped out of an aircraft into his own occupied country, on a mission behind German lines, to help take it back. He came home decorated, with the Croix de Guerre among his honors, and he lived until 1979.
Hold that against the painting in front of you. A man who had every reason to see the world as a grim place chose, for the rest of his life, to spend his days painting it anyway, the ordinary corners of France and, here, a single old tree given all the weight and dignity most painters save for a person. This is a man who had seen the very worst deciding, deliberately, to keep looking for what was worth painting in the country he had risked his life to free. A gnarled survivor, set down by a survivor. That is what you have on your wall.
Marc Delamoriniere was a Parisian, born in 1904 in the 16th arrondissement, the elegant district on the Right Bank where the city meets the Bois de Boulogne. But his brush was never tied to the capital. He had a real feeling for the overlooked face of France: a tucked-away corner, a small bridge, a lone old tree, the ordinary things most people walk straight past.
That is what makes this painting so characteristic of him. It is not a grand monument or a famous view. It is one weathered tree, looked at hard and taken seriously, the kind of subject that only rewards a painter who actually stops in front of it, and he clearly did.
He belongs to a long line of French painters who gave their lives to the light of their own country, from the Barbizon painters who left Paris for the countryside to the Impressionists who chased the sun across it. Delamoriniere carried that love into the 20th century, with a special affection for the plain, unfamous corners of France.
This particular painting surfaced a lifetime later near Lyon, in the east of France. From there it has traveled across an ocean to reach you.
The painting's journey: from the France of Marc Delamoriniere, found near Lyon a lifetime later, and now on its way across the world to you.
Delamoriniere painted in the years right after the war he had fought in, when the grey years lifted and life came roaring back, in Paris and far beyond it. Fashion, film, music, and new inventions poured out of the peace he had risked everything for. Here is a little of the world of those years.
This is an oil painted on cardboard, a support many mid-century painters loved for working quickly and directly from life. It is rigid like a panel and appreciates a stable, dry environment. These are the basics of keeping it beautiful for the decades ahead.
Every painting that leaves Raw Brush goes to someone I will probably never meet. I film a short message for each one, so that at least once, you hear directly from the person who found it.
In this video I share what drew me to this painting, and a genuine thank you for trusting me with your walls.