Olive Trees in the Holy Land

Olive Trees in the Holy Land, painted in 1879 and now in the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, belongs to the series of plein-air studies Polenov produced during and after his 1881-1882 journey to Palestine, Egypt, and Syria. The olive tree was among the most freighted botanical symbols available to a painter of biblical subjects: olive groves appear throughout the Old and New Testaments, the Garden of Gethsemane where Christ prayed before his arrest was an olive grove, and the ancient trees that survive in Palestine today may be direct descendants of those that grew in the first century. Polenov approached the subject with the botanical precision of a plein-air naturalist rather than a symbolist, painting specific trees in specific light with the same commitment to direct observation he brought to landscape studies in France or Russia. The result transforms a potentially conventional religious symbol into a vivid record of actual encounter with the living landscape of Christian history.

Oil on canvas, the painting exploits the characteristic silver-green of the olive leaf and the gnarled, writhing quality of old olive trunks as both botanical fact and compositional device. Mediterranean light models the foliage in warm illuminated masses against cooler shadow, and the pale, rocky Palestinian soil grounds the trees in their specific geography.