What Remains Standing

I first saw the painting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. You go into these galleries the way you walk into a quiet church, out of respect, maybe routine. Some paintings catch your eye, and we've discussed some of those finds here. Others just blur into one another. But this one didn’t catch. It stopped me.

It was the tree. Not the figures, not the sheep, not even the sunlit hillside unfurling like a memory. The tree, dead, jagged, enormous, stood in the foreground like a thing that refused to fall, and dared you to ask why. It didn’t lean or flourish. It loomed. Its bark had split down the middle, its arms twisted in mid-collapse. It was ugly, almost violent. An arresting and beautiful violence.

The painting is called Shepherds and Their Flock Resting Under a Tree, by Charles Hoguet, a 19th-century German painter trained in the French tradition. Most of his landscapes are soft, meditative, full of light and coastline, and carefully balanced in pastoral settings. But this one, this one feels like it was pulled out of something older and harder. There’s no drama in the action, only in the stillness.

Two shepherds kneel under the portion of the tree that is less broken, but not untouched. Their flock grazes at the margin of a crumbling hillside. Behind them, a valley stretches toward a hazy bluff. There’s a castle or an outpost on a ridge in the distance, long since surrendered to sky. Everything here is reaching the point just before it disappears.

But that tree, closer, darker, louder than anything else, refuses disappearance. It insists on being seen. And not in a heroic way. In a brutally honest one. This is a tree that’s survived something, probably several somethings, and it shows. It’s not clean, nor is it picturesque. Its top is gone. Its branches are serrated. It looks less like a piece of nature and more like the aftermath of history. And still, like many of us, it stands.

That’s the current running under the whole canvas. Not beauty. Not peace. Not even nostalgia. Endurance. And not the glamorous kind, either. The kind that makes you wince a little. The kind that outlives everything else because it has no other choice.

There’s light in the painting, yes, but it’s selective. The clouds aren’t parting. They’re drifting. Sunlight hits only what’s needed: a patch of grass, the backs of sheep, a coat sleeve. The rest stays in partial shadow, like memory that hasn’t decided whether to stay or go. It’s not dramatic lighting. It’s aging light. Patient, precise. The kind that knows how to wait.

The shepherds are small. Almost incidental. They don’t speak. They don’t pose. Tending to their sheep under the tree, their smallness isn’t sad. It’s truthful. This is not their story. They’re part of the landscape, not above it. And in that, they’re freer than we are.

I stood there longer than I meant to. And as I did, I started to feel something I hadn’t expected: relief. There’s a strange comfort in seeing something worn and broken and still present. We spend so much of our lives trying to appear whole, online, at work, in front of people we love, that we forget how much weight the broken things carry. That not every tree needs to bloom. Some just need to remain.

The painting doesn’t glorify decay. But it doesn’t flinch from it, either. It lets you see it up close. The cracks in the trunk. The rot at the roots. The moss where life keeps growing anyway. It says: yes, this happened. And also: yes, this still matters.

We no longer make space for that kind of story. Not in art, not in life. We like our ruins curated, our wear made aesthetic. We paint over the cracks, crop out the shadow, retouch the old into something easier to consume. But Hoguet didn’t do that here. He let the broken tree take center stage. And in doing so, he told a different kind of story.

A story where the tree survives not because it’s strong, but because it never stopped being rooted.

A story where the people are small, not to be dismissed, but to be remembered as part of the larger truth.

A story where light doesn’t save, it selects, and shadow doesn’t threaten, it preserves.

When I think about that painting now, I don’t picture the whole scene. I picture one moment: the split trunk rising into a fractured sky, with the hillside quiet, the sheep grazing, the shepherd resting against the curve of the earth. No one speaks. Nothing moves. And yet everything is still here.

And like us, it's still broken. Still beautiful. Still here.

Shepherds and Their Flock Resting Under a Tree, Charles Hoguet, 19th century. Photograph by the author. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA.