In the 1790s, Jacob Phillip Hackert began drawing and painting in the vicinity of the Camaldolese monastery and the San Eremo hermitage in the greater Florence area. Hackert wrote to Goethe that he was mainly interested in the trees embedded in the landscape. or, as it can be observed in his vedutas, as a kind of repoussoir for determining the “distance”, as Hackert calls it, while they rarely appear as protagonists. On the forest slopes of Camaldoli, olive trees are rarely found, but there is a much more varied vegetation of firs, larches, chestnuts, beeches and oaks. This special botanical position and the emblematic importance of the olive tree for the flora of Italy may have inspired Hackert to paint this tree portrait. In a fine and nuanced work method, he models the gnarled, moss-covered bark of the ancient tree, the fine and dense foliage, adding earthy-gray tones of the lichen-covered rocks in the foreground. The small figure of the hunter with his dog in the background, which almost seems to escape the eye, illustrates the size of the olive tree. In addition to the idealizing component of his works, such paintings, which are characterized by a meticulous observation of reality, are proof of Hackert's intensive reflection on painterly objectives and the questioning of genre norms. [KT]