Weber also painted many trees, including those in "The Naked Tree," a 1931 work that also depicts a horse, the only animal visible in any of the paintings.
A teen-ager willfully ignoring possible danger and a man standing silently outside her house, wearing a creepy hat and partially obscured by naked tree branches — in movies, this means that death is coming in on great big cat feet.
And yet in its own way "Peanuts" could make a bit of newsprint as forlorn as a set for "Waiting for Godot" (with a kite, of course, caught in the naked tree and a doghouse somewhere in the distance).
Tom Pye's mood-perfect set, awash in gentle flame lighting by Don Holder, makes dexterous and witty use of romantic visual staples like shimmering curtains, rich tapestries, a single naked tree and autumn leaves.
Around us, the unique shape of each naked tree broadcast its biography: this listing dark-barked cherry had been bent almost to breaking as a sapling in a great ice storm in the 1960's; that wart-like knot in an oak testified to a lost limb.
I could tell Jake about the end of the winter he left, about the first sound that broke the silence of my sorrow: the gentle chirp of a swallow on the branch of a naked tree, which said spring had come again.
