Girls in Trees- dryads, hamadryads and the cult of the nymph

Marty, Illustration for Bilitis, 1937

The wood-nymphs, the dryads and hamadryads, have been understood since antiquity to have a powerful bond with the trees with which they are linked. They bear the trees names (as with caryatids, the nymphs of the nut trees), they live amongst them and- in the case of hamadryads, they live within them. The hamadryad is the soul, the animating spirit, of the tree which she inhabits and their continued existences are inseparably intertwined. To fell a tree is to murder the dryad within- and it can lead to grief and vengeance on the part of her sisters. This is most melodramatically expressed in Gabriel Guay’s 1891 canvas, Le mort du chene (The Death of the Oak).

Guay, La mort du chene

There is plentiful scope for confusion between nymphs and flesh and blood females, and it is not always easy to tell from some paintings whether the artist is truly presenting a nymph or was simply painting a ‘nymph’- a model who just happened to have stripped off in a quiet woodland glade to bask in the sunshine and was, therefore, only figuratively a nymph in the sense of a being young female. If we add to the mix a suggestion that a country girl might be a bit wild in spirit and would allow her uninhibited nature to show, the confusion or cross-over could be compounded.

Joseph Tomanek, Nymph in a Tree

Enter Pierre Louys. I’ve often mentioned his 1894 book, Les Chansons de Bilitis, a pastiched lesbian autobiography purporting to descend from antique times. It’s full of fairly explicit sex- and it starts as it means to go on. The second chapter of the first part is titled ‘The Tree.’ Bilitis is still a young girl, a ‘nymphet,’ perhaps. She goes out into the countryside one day:

“I undressed to climb a tree; my naked thighs embraced the smooth and humid bark; my sandals climbed upon the branches.

High up, but still beneath the leaves and shaded from the heat, I straddled a wide-spread fork and swung my feet into the void.

It had rained. Drops of water fell and flowed upon my skin. My hands were soiled with moss and my heels were reddened by the crushed blossoms.

I felt the lovely tree living when the wind passed through it; so I locked my legs tighter, and crushed my open lips to the hairy nape of a bough.”

Needless to say, several illustrators of Louys work have seized upon this just episode as much as her affairs with her younger girlfriends- as we see from the examples by Marty (above), Harry G. Spanner (1926) and others below.

Suzanne Ballivet, Bilitis, 1943

Sylvain Sauvage, Bilitis, 1927

Carefree girls swinging in trees can be expressive of all sorts of things- of a simple, naturist pleasure of playing in the sun; of a unity with the natural world and, it follows, with a more natural upbringing in the countryside, away from the city. Louys, however, responded to another strand of late nineteenth century thinking. Rather than seeing rural childhood as innocent Eden, various writers and psychologists (such as Albert Moll, Havelock Ellis and Emil Schultze-Malkowsky) argued that exposure to nature only served to teach children about sex at an early age. Watching all those wild animals and livestock just gave impressionable youth ideas, it was warned. If a natural lifestyle was one that corrupted and tempted, it was only a short step back to the nymphs, who were conceived in their very natures to be lusty and active, constantly engaged in sex with Pan and his priapic entourage of satyrs.

Erich Lamm, Nude in a Tree

Paul Leroy, Dans les branches du grand pin

Of course, the nymphs went further than this. They lurked amongst the trees, waiting to pounce on hapless men or passing centaurs, seducing them too. This is one of themes that I particularly pursue in my new book, The Woods are Filled with Gods- Dryads, Satyrs and Centaurs, available now as an e-book and paperback from Amazon/ KDP. The book looks briefly at the origins and history of the nymphs, centaurs and satyrs, but my real interest is how we’ve used these stories in our modern art and literature. I refer (of course) to Pierre Louys, as well as many other poets and artists I’ve discussed, such as writer Clark Ashton Smith and Belgian cartoonist and illustrator Paul Cuvelier.

To celebrate the new book, I’ve also started a new blog, nymphologyblog.wordpress.com.