Painting Trees, Disney-Style

What '4 Artists Paint 1 Tree' tells us about looking and art.

While reading about mid-century Disney features for my post on London-set animation, I was pointed to a short documentary produced by the studio in 1958. 4 Artists Paint 1 Tree was originally broadcast as part of one of the company’s behind-the-scenes programs—the ones hosted by Walt himself in full avuncular mode.¹ Its simple, pragmatic elegance has raised it out of the archives and turned it into a bit of a cult object.

The film opens with Disney quoting from painter Robert Henri to the effect that artists must be themselves, not try to second-guess what is expected of their art. He goes on to introduce four artists currently working at Disney on Sleeping Beauty (1959): Marc Davis, Eyvind Earle, Joshua Meador and Walt Peregoy. The men’s roles at the studio are briefly explained. They then decamp to an oak tree near their workplace and proceed to paint it, each in his own manner. At the end, we are shown the four finished paintings. Henri would be satisfied: each is very different from the others and shot through with the personality of its creator.

As they work, the artists describe their process in voiceover, explaining what they see in the tree and how they seek to convey this in the painting. Here are Peregoy’s opening comments:

The thing that impresses me most is that this tree is a marvellous piece of engineering. It’s a structure, and I’m going to try to reproduce it graphically. Strong, straight inclines will build architectural patterns for me. I can see the tree building itself on my board like a skyscraper. I’m even more reminded of a skyscraper when I study the lower horizontal branches. They are very much like steel girders, designed for tremendous stress and strain. Only a strong geometric interpretation can do justice to this terrific strength.

Peregoy, who spiced Disney features of the era with his bold modernist artwork, here produces a characteristically abstracted and angular image. Davis, one of the great character animators in Disney history, comes up with something more grounded but also simplified, and very readable through its stark contrast. There is a more delicate interplay of light and shadow in Meador’s painting, as we might expect from the effects animator who conjured up the fairy dust in Sleeping Beauty. Earle, a painter with a remarkable feel for trees, focuses this time on the trunk, rendering its gnarled sinews in exquisite detail.

Earle paints the oak: “What I’m looking for is contained in the trunk as much as in any part of this tree.”

We can pick favourites. (For my money, it’s Peregoy’s.) But the interest lies in the contrasts between the four. The film beautifully illustrates the varieties of ways of looking; through the artists’ narration, we learn something of the interests and assumptions that condition what they see. For Walt Disney, the men aren’t painting the oak tree as such. He returns at the end to quote Henri again: “The great painter has something to say. He does not paint men, landscapes or furniture, but an idea.”

I’m reminded of Antonio López García, the middle-aged painter in Víctor Erice’s extraordinarily subtle documentary The Quince Tree Sun (1992; watch a clip below), who strives with endless patience to capture the light on the quince tree in his garden. As the season changes and the fruits hang lower, it is the passage of time itself that he sees, and intimations of his own mortality creep into the film. Dissatisfied with his efforts, Antonio decides to draw the tree instead; we learn that he has already abandoned previous attempts to paint it. (Was he more decisive in his youth?) There is only one artist in this film, but the way he looks at his subject, or represents what he sees, fluctuates too.

I notice that I’ve been preoccupied in these posts with the question of looking. This, for me, was at the heart of Olivia & the Clouds (2024), one of the best animated films of the year. It also runs through my piece on representations of London in animation, and at the end of my post on Samson & Sally (1984) I wonder what the young me saw as he watched the movie.

This could be the effect of returning to writing after a spell in production. The creation of animation and cinema is rooted in observation, and the critic watches the works in turn. There are two steps to this meditation on looking—or three, if the film happens to feature someone intently engaged in observation, like a painter. As a critic, I end up very aware that I’m writing about not the film as such but what I see in it. And if I rewatch it tomorrow or next year, what I see will be different.

Criticism thrives on disagreement; reading multiple reviews of a work can be fascinating. (Would anyone watch a doc called 4 Critics Review 1 Movie?) Even a film as straightforward as 4 Artists Paint 1 Tree prompted clashing impressions in me. As well as a study of looking and creativity, it came across as a bite-sized lesson in the animation production process and painting techniques; a portrait of the tension between idiosyncratic artistry and conformity, both of which are required to make a good animated studio feature; and a cynical bit of marketing from a company with a patchy track record in recognising the contributions of its individual artists. Yet the first description seemed the most relevant to me. I was irked at first by Disney’s paternalistic tone and the artifice with which the narration is stitched together. But then I rewatched the film, buoyed by my enthusiasm for it, and these problems barely registered.

I’m not sure what happened to the four paintings. I’m told the oak itself is still standing,² and I hope one day I’ll get my own chance to observe it. In the meantime, the film is there, asking to be looked at in all kinds of ways. I’m curious to know what you think of it.

1. 4 Artists Paint 1 Tree aired as part of “An Adventure in Art”, an episode of Disneyland. Launched in 1954, this was the original incarnation of the studio’s anthology TV series, which has continued to air on and off ever since.

2. Animation historian and critic Charles Solomon tells me that, from what he hears, “The tree is still alive and, so far as we know, well.” Were Disney to remake the film today, which artists would the studio pick to star in it?