Cherry Trees, Winter

'The sense of menace in Burra's paintings derives not only from demons like those in The Burning House, who gloat as the building is razed to the ground. It stems also from the hallucinatory intensity of Burra's vision: a bed of yellow lupins [Lupins and Peonies] and swathes of cherry blossom [the present work], seem to melt under his gaze, and the flowers in each case become a soft glutinous mass; this is not really a Surrealist metamorphosis because identity is not being changed, there is no use of symbol or metaphor. In Samuel Palmer's In a Shoreham Garden, where the fruit tree blossom is so dense that the underlying form is lost, the result is joyful, while with Burra life at its most burgeoning seems to become sickly through excess; something from which pleasure might be expected becomes distasteful. Rigid pointing fingers representing the branches of espalier-trained fruit trees that have not yet come into flower are seen against trees already covered with swags of luxurious blossom - an expression of the Romantic theme of the cycle of life and death in nature; for Burra it is more death in life than the opposite because of the frailty of the blossom against the hard skeletal frames of the dormant trees' (Andrew Causey, op. cit., p. 76).