3-016-768 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"The Woods in Autumn", by Henry Jutsum, in the Exhibition of the British Institution, 1864. Engraving of a painting. 'The season...is far advanced, as we see by the sparse foliage of sere and yellow leaves, the great dry, stubbly ferns; the carpeting of dead leaves, brown and red, drifted by the wind into every hollow, and the felling of the sapless trees. As late as the middle of November is the period chosen for commencing to fell the beech, the ash, and some other trees. The great silvery-barked trunks of several fine beeches lie about, lopped of their branches and ready for the timber merchant. Other fine stems, or "boles," as they are called in some districts of England, are being felled by the foresters, and to the left some noble "butts" are drawn away by a team of oxen. The felling of so many fine beeches, which look more than usually beautiful when - as in this picture - tipped with the evening sunlight, might be no very pleasant sight to some ardent lovers of woodland scenery. Their loss from the cleared space in the view before us is, however, more than compensated by the prospect thereby opened of true English landscape, with its undulating fields and hedgerows, its scattered trees and familiar village church-tower'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.