In the first of these two articles showing tents in paintings, I covered those depicting historical battles of the more distant past. Today’s sequel brings those up to date with tents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, starting with one of John Singer Sargent’s works as a war artist in the closing months of the First World War.

Sargent painted several scenes in military medical facilities, including this watercolour of the Interior of a Hospital Tent, with its packed rows of folding camp beds and a multitude of guy ropes visible through its large windows.

During his travels in the Middle East, Alberto Pasini must have become very familiar with the sight of An Arab Camp, shown here at a small watering place in 1866. From the dress and preponderance of horses, this was probably further north into Syria or even Turkey.

Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863) was one of his most successful paintings based on the studies from his first visit to the west in 1859. This shows a summit of 3,187 metres (10,456 feet), named by its surveyors after a general who died in the Civil War. The First Nation people shown are Shoshone, seen in their traditional wigwams with their characteristic circular opening.

Nearly fifty years after the event, François-Auguste Biard painted The Duke of Orleans Received in a Lapland Camp, August 1795 (1841). This shows the Duke looking disdainful and detached in a Sami tent, apparently shunning the bowl that is being offered to him. The tent’s framework of poles is clearly visible, and put to good use bearing the weight of the pot and drying furs.

Tents were also popular with explorers and those prospecting for valuable minerals such as gold.

Ludwig Becker painted this watercolour view of his prospector’s tent at Bendigo, in the Australian outback during the early years of its gold rush in 1853, one of several paintings he exhibited in Melbourne the following year. At its height, similar tents and shacks housed forty thousand prospectors, including the artist.

Edward Adrian Wilson’s rough pencil sketch of Camping after Dark (1910) shows a cutaway of a ‘pyramid’ tent in the Antarctic, its three occupants crammed in tightly together. From their tangle of legs and boots to the mittens and balaclava hats hanging to thaw and dry above them, it’s cramped but warm and sheltered. Wilson was one of Captain Scott’s party who died during their return from the South Pole two years later.

Tents had also become popular temporary shelters at fun events across the world.

William Powell Frith’s famous painting of Derby Day (1856-58) shows some of the canvas palaces installed for this horse-racing festival at Epsom, to the south of London. The tent in the left foreground is that of the Reform Club, an exclusive private members club in London, founded in 1836.

One of Émile Friant’s earliest works is this 1881 painting of The Entrance of the Clowns, showing the interior of the Big Top at the moment that the clowns, acrobats, and other entertainers parade. Many circuses relied on these huge tents to contain their spectators around the ring where the entertainers performed.

Pierre Bonnard’s The Beach (Arcachon) from about 1922, shows this beach packed with tents and awnings covering the golden sand, and crowds of people and moored yachts in the distance.

In the summer of 1913, the Danish painter Laurits Andersen Ring and his family holidayed in their caravan. In his View of a Shore with the Artist’s Wagon and Tent at Enö, they are seen on the south-west coast of the island of Enø. They have spilled out into a tent, whose heavy guy ropes are being used to dry washing, perhaps not such a far cry from the armies of long past.

Despite their popularity as crops for millennia, cereals require preparation into more palatable form before they can form the mainstay of most diets, as one of the staple sources of carbohydrates, as they were across Europe before the popularisation of the potato after 1750. Wheat and rye were most commonly crushed into flour in mills, then that was baked into bread.

Early manual milling was replaced during classical times by mills driven by a range of natural power, including animals, wind and water. In 1786, the first steam-powered grain mill opened for business in London, although wind and water were to remain dominant in many rural districts until well into the twentieth century.

Windmills developed during the Middle Ages, and by 1500 were widespread across many parts of Europe. Although their design evolved and improved into the nineteenth century, their common principle is to expose rotating sails to wind, and transfer that rotating force to one of a pair of large millstones, within which the grain or grist is ground into flour.

Rembrandt painted few non-narrative landscapes, but among them is his dramatic view of The Mill (1645-48) seen in the rich rays of twilight. This is a post mill, whose wooden top was turned into the wind to set its sails turning. It’s sited on a small hill giving it the greatest exposure to wind.

The great masters of Dutch landscape art like Jacob van Ruisdael must have painted many hundreds of windmills, of which one of the best-known is this view of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from about 1670. This small town, now a city, is on the bank of the River Rhine, an ideal location for delivering sacks of grain by barge, and shipping the resulting sacks of flour. This should have kept this tower mill as busy as the wind allowed, and its owner prosperous.

The British topographic painter John Varley painted this close-up view of the well-known Red House Mill, Battersea, Surrey, with its good access by barge and proximity to the city of London. This is a wooden smock mill, a design pioneered by the Dutch in the seventeenth century.

Samuel Palmer’s Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, but 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.

Some windmills used their power to cut wood in sawmills, and others raised water, tasks also powered by water in watermills. These were of even more ancient origin, devised by combining waterwheels with toothed gears in the couple of centuries before the Christian era.

The Old Water Mill from 1790 is one of British painter George Morland’s finest landscapes, and shows a small undershot watermill deep in the English countryside.

A contemporary of Morland, James Ward wasn’t shy of showing the increasing dereliction in the troubled British countryside at this time. An Overshot Mill (1802-1807) shows a rickety overshot watermill used for the grinding of grain. Its fabric is in dire need of repairs, and the thatchers are already making a start on its roof.

John Constable’s contrasting view of Parham Mill, Gillingham from about 1826 shows an undershot watermill near the town of Gillingham in Dorset, visited by the artist during the early 1820s. Also known as Parham’s Mill and later Purns Mill, it burned to the ground in 1825.

When the German-American landscape artist Albert Bierstadt was painting in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1855 he made this idyllic view of A Rustic Mill which is clearly overshot, being fed along a wooden aqueduct. In contrast to many of the other paintings of mills from this period, this appears in an excellent state of repair and prosperous.

Nikolai Astrup’s Going to the Mill from about 1900-05 is a complete essay on watermills, pictured in perfect rainy milling weather, with the streams in spate during the autumn/fall. A mill race, running down its wooden channel, feeds a small undershot paddle in the centre, used to turn a millstone for sharpening knives and tools. Water flow to that is regulated by the simple valve upstream, currently in the off position, and shedding the water to either side. The man and his son are taking a sack of grain up to another mill, possibly the small shed seen in the centre distance, to grind flour for the family’s baking.

That completes my pictorial account of cereals in arable farming prior to mechanisation, from plowing the soil to milling the grain into flour. Pure arable farming was unusual, though, and the companions to fields of cereals were often sheep, the subject of next week’s article.