It’s too cold along the coast of New England for this weekend’s travels, so let’s go to the West Coast, to California instead. In this article and its sequel tomorrow I’ll show you some of the few accessible paintings made of that coast, from San Francisco to Laguna Beach, and from 1872 to after 1935.

In May 1872, Albert Bierstadt visited the Farallon Islands, a group of uninhabited rocks thirty miles to the west of San Francisco. From this came his dramatic Seals on the Rocks, Farallon Islands (c 1872-73), one of a short series that he painted of the islands in those years.

Although I don’t have a date for Jean Mannheim’s painting of Irvine Cove – Laguna Beach, California, I suspect it was completed long before this resort to the south-east of Los Angeles became a city in 1927. Its first hotel was built in 1886, and this section of the coast became popular with artists in the early twentieth century, but this part at the north-west end of Laguna Beach seems to have remained relatively unspoilt until the completion of the Pacific Coast Highway in 1926. Mannheim was one of the early painters to visit and work en plein air here.

Granville Redmond’s early paintings of this coast are in Tonalist style, with muted colours. His Coastal Storm from 1905 contrasts the wind and heavy rain sweeping in from the right with the distant view of the coast in much fairer conditions. He appears to have used fine scratching in the diagonals of the falling rain.

Redmond’s Sailboats on Calm Seas is a small oil sketch from the following year, with masterly modelling of wave-splash at the bows of the yacht. His colours remain muted.

Morning on the Pacific (1911) is an intermediate step towards Redmond’s later style, in this painterly view of the sea. My only puzzle here is that the title clearly establishes the time of day as morning, but the direction of view appears to be to the west, where you’d expect the sun to be in the later afternoon.

Redmond’s A Field of California Poppies, also from 1911, erupts into a richly coloured carpet of California or Golden Poppies, the state flower associated with the Golden State, and the Gold Rush. There are also a few smaller patches of what may be the large-leaved or purple lupine.

At some time in 1911 or later, William Frederic Ritschel painted Monterey Coast, to the south of San Francisco. Monterey itself has a long history, and in 1777 became the capital of the province of “Both Californias”. Away from the port and city, though, this section of coast is rugged and much remains inaccessible.

For The Sand Cart (1917), George Bellows travelled to the coast of California, where he caught working men engaged in manual labour, this time against a very different coastal background. This painting was shown on his return to New York, where it was well-received by critics, who compared it with the coastal paintings of Winslow Homer.

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.