The oak was the pinnacle of tree portraiture for British artists. It was associated with the sturdy character of the British people, and the ships constructed from it defended their liberty. Crome's picture was exhibited in 1824 as a Study from Nature. It shows a noble tree at Poringland, a village near Norwich.

Crome admired the work of Thomas Gainsborough. Here he concentrates Gainsborough's woodland scenes to a single herotic motif, as if to emphasise a local ancestry for a national symbol. At the same time, the warm cloudy sky is based on the seventeenth-century Dutch painter, Aelbert Cuyp.