The Upas, or Poison-Tree, in the Island of Java

Francis Danby's The Upas, or Poison-Tree, in the Island of Java (c. 1820) depicts the legendary tree whose toxic emanations were supposed to kill all life within a wide radius — a popular subject of Romantic fascination that blended natural history, travel literature, and horror. The myth of the Upas tree, spread by Dutch colonial accounts, captured the Romantic imagination as a symbol of nature's destructive power and the exotic dangers of distant lands. Danby painted this early in his career during his Bristol period, when he was developing the visionary, literary landscape style that would make his reputation.

Danby creates an atmosphere of toxic menace through a sickly, greenish palette and the careful rendering of dead and dying vegetation radiating outward from the central tree, combining botanical observation with the imaginative exaggeration characteristic of Romantic literary painting.