As we near the grain harvest in the northern hemisphere, so come the summer storms. Just as the farmworkers have ventured out into the fields of dry, ripe wheat, the heavens above become inky black as towering clouds bring torrential rain and rolling thunder. This weekend we’re in for more than our fair share, in the company of many of the great landscape artists.

At the dawn of modern landscape painting, Giorgione’s The Tempest from about 1504-8 centres on an approaching storm. The sky is filled with inky dark clouds, and there’s a bolt of lightning in the distance. The figures here imply an underlying narrative, but today that can only be speculated.

Nicolas Poussin’s setting of a Landscape during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) shows the city of Babylon in the distance, along a picturesque and pastoral valley. But the peacefulness of this landscape has been transformed by the sudden arrival of a thunderstorm: the gusty wind is already bending the trees, and near the centre of the view a large branch has broken with its force. Two bolts of lightning make their way to the hills below.

There’s frantic activity in response not only to the storm, but to a lioness attacking a horse, whose rider has fallen. An adjacent horseman is about to thrust his spear into the back of the lioness, while another, further ahead, is driving cattle away from the scene. Others on foot, and a fourth horseman, are scurrying away, driven by the combination of the lioness and the imminent storm.

In the foreground, Pyramus lies dying, his sword at his side, and his blood flowing freely on the ground, down to a small pond. Thisbe has just emerged from sheltering in the cave, has run past the bloodied shawl at the right, and is about to reach the body of her lover.

Still attributed to Poussin’s pupil and brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, this Landscape with Lightning from 1667-69 lacks the subtlety and finesse of the master himself, but shows a bolt of lightning striking ground and setting a fire in the countryside. In the foreground, a couple flee from among trees being shattered by the strong gusts brought by the storm.

The founding fathers of landscape painting in the Northern Renaissance weren’t to be outdone by those of the south: Aelbert Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht from about 1645 is amazingly effective and accurate, considering it was painted more than two centuries before anyone saw high-speed photographic images of lightning.

In Claude-Joseph Vernet’s series The Four Times of Day from 1757, by Midday the clouds of early morning have built into squally showers. While two people are fishing with nets, a couple with an infant and a dog, in the left foreground, are hurrying for shelter before heavy rain starts. Behind them a shepherd has brought their flock under a grove of trees. Seagulls are wheeling and soaring in the strengthening wind.

George Morland’s Before a Thunderstorm (1791) shows well the rising wind and threatening sky just before a summer storm strikes.

When he was only sixteen, in 1821, Samuel Palmer painted this watercolour sketch At Hailsham, Sussex: a Storm Approaching, a faithful representation of Cumulus congestus building in the distance.

Palmer’s watercolour Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, but set in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex, in the south-east of England. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they’re driven by the wind. Beyond that mill are fields of ripening cereal.

John Constable’s half-size and well-developed study for Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows places an angler in the foreground, as a thunderstorm builds over the Wiltshire countryside behind. Sadly, the fisherman didn’t survive into Constable’s finished painting.

With the Napoleonic Wars concluded, many hoped that Europe could look forward to a period of peace, and its peoples would be spared involvement in battles and their resulting fires. Instead, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought even more devastating conflagrations, many of which were witnessed by artists and committed to canvas.

The city of London had seen its last immense fire in ‘the Great Fire of London’ of 1666, but like many cities was no stranger to more limited destruction.

In about 1826, when he was staying in Hampstead overlooking London, John Constable painted this marvellous oil sketch of Fire in London, Seen from Hampstead.

It was on 16 October 1834 that Constable had his greatest opportunity, when fire completely destroyed the Old Palace of Westminster, the seat of the English parliament at the time.

When the old Palace caught fire, most of London turned out to watch the flames. John Constable was in a cab, stuck in a jam on Westminster Bridge, from where he painted this Fire Sketch (1834), showing the north end of the building ablaze. He did not, apparently, try to develop it into anything more substantial.

With his arch-rival Constable stuck in a cab on Westminster Bridge, JMW Turner was still on the ‘south’ bank, at the far end of that bridge. From there, or rather later, he painted one version of The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 (1834-5) in oils. The two prominent towers seen behind the fire are those of Westminster Abbey.

Turner’s other canvas shows a view from near what is now Hungerford Bridge, still on the ‘south’ bank of the Thames because of the traffic jam, but that was before the construction of what might have been a convenient means for Turner to have crossed the river. In this view, Westminster Bridge is silhouetted against the flames, instead of being lit by them, and the massive towers of Westminster Abbey appear ghostly in the distance.

Turner capitalised successfully on this spectacle, although these paintings aren’t the atmospheric sketches they might appear to be. A lot of the oil paint has been applied wet on dry, showing that Turner must have worked on each for several weeks, at least, in the studio.

In 1837, the French landscape painter Pierre Marie Joseph Vernet was working in Saint Petersburg, Russia, when the Winter Palace, the official residence of the emperor, caught fire. Vernet’s Fire in the Winter Palace, 1837 is a studio painting showing that spectacular event, based on observations and sketches he made at the time of the fire.

It’s not only man’s buildings that burn. When dry prairies are struck by lightning, they too can catch alight, and that’s the scene that Charles Deas narrates so well in his masterly painting of Prairie on Fire from 1847.

A bolt of lightning, at the far right, tells us how the prairie came to be aflame. From this low viewpoint, the fire itself appears unimpressive, but is dangerously close behind these three people riding two horses in their flight. On the nearer white horse is a young man, facing behind and away from the viewer, looking back at the fire. His left arm is wrapped around a young woman, who appears to have swooned away.

Behind is a black horse, with an older, bearded man in the saddle. He points to the left, exhorting the others to head that way to safety. The tension results from implication: that the unimpressive flames at the right represent a much larger and imminently threatening danger, and that it’s progressing rapidly to the left, chasing the horses and their riders.

Even when you’re on an idyllic Pacific island, as this anonymous painting of The Burning of the Harbor Master’s House, Honolulu (1852) reminds us, the dangers of fire are never far away.

Johan Christian Dahl’s Burning Windmill at Stege (1856) adopts contemporary style and use of colour, but is fundamentally a brandje in the Golden Age tradition of Egbert van der Poel of two centuries earlier. Although painted well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature.

Jules Breton’s The Burning Haystack from 1856 shows a minor blaze, but an important change in the approach to fire. Here the people of Courrières are making frenetic but co-ordinated efforts to extinguish a fire that has broken out in one of their grainstacks. Each of its multitude of figures is playing their role as part of the whole, working from an unseen script.

My next group of paintings show the devastating fire that struck Frederiksborg Castle, near Hillerød in the north of Zealand (Sjælland), Denmark. Set in a huge deer park, the castle was used as King Frederick VII’s residence during the 1850s. When he was resident on the night of 16 December 1859, the weather was bitterly cold, prompting the king to ask for a fire to be lit in a room; because its chimney was being repaired, this allowed the fire to spread. It was so cold that the moat around the castle was frozen, preventing any serious attempts to control the fire, and allowing it to spread rapidly to most of the buildings. Thankfully the king’s collection of more than three hundred paintings were saved.

This anonymous painting of Frederiksborg Castle on Fire (1859) was probably made in the relative comfort of a studio shortly afterwards.

Another anonymous view of Frederiksborg Castle on Fire (1859) appears to be a quick oil sketch made at the height of the fire during that night.

Ferdinand Richardt’s The Castle on Fire, 1859 (1859) was clearly a more protracted work from his studio, probably made from the artist’s contemporary sketches and notes.

There is no question that Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky’s detailed realist depiction of Fire in the Village (1885) was painted entirely in the studio. Its emphasis on people and their loss and suffering is characteristic of Naturalism. Most significantly, Dmitriev-Orenburgsky lived and worked in Paris between 1875-85, during the height of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s success; the latter had only died a few months before Dmitriev-Orenburgsky completed this painting.

William A Coulter had been born in Ireland, and travelled to the USA as a seaman. In 1869, he settled in San Francisco, trained in Europe as a marine artist, then from 1896 worked on the art staff of the San Francisco Call newspaper. He witnessed and painted the San Francisco Fire of 1906, which remains his only well-known work. It was clearly made in the studio, presumably from observation and sketches.

My final painting is one of the best-documented: Edvard Munch’s The House is Burning! from 1927. On the morning of 31 August 1927, the maids working in a manor house close to Munch’s studio were using an electric vacuum cleaner when fire broke out in that room. They and the occupants of the house fled. Munch and other neighbours helped the owners rescue many of their possessions.

The local fire brigade attended promptly, and the fire was soon brought under control. Although there have been claims that Munch set his easel up during the fire, this painting is more probably based on a photograph published in a newspaper the following day, carefully recomposed and augmented to heighten its drama. The witness is now a photograph rather than a painting.