A single tree, sometimes a single apple tree, was an important motif for Peter Coker, in both his drawings and paintings, from the mid 1950s. The two versions of Tree and Hedge painted in 1956 (the second of which is in the collection of the Alfred East Art Gallery, Kettering) provided an especially significant precedent for the present work. They introduced a new fluidity into Coker’s work, of which this oil, produced about a decade later, was one of the ultimate expressions. After a long concentration on trees en masse – in his representations of the forests of Epping, Rendlesham and Tunstall – he returned in Apple Tree to a single specimen and presented it heroically and on an epic scale. Its expressionist handling and powerful palette suggest a tension between the tree itself – surviving, growing – and the elements with which it interacts