In this second day of our visit to the coast of California in paintings, we have reached the years of the First World War, whose trenches and mud in northern Europe must have seemed so far removed.

In 1915, Anna Althea Hills painted The Quiet Sea, probably close to Laguna Beach, where she settled at that time, and went on to help found the Laguna Beach Art Museum shortly before her untimely death at the age of just forty-eight, in 1930. As this demonstrates, she was an early and accomplished painter en plein air, which she taught in her painting school there.

Hill’s Spell of the Sea (also known as Laguna Beach, near Moss Point) (1920) must be among her best, and compares well with those being painted on the south coast of France at the time. She painted this further down the coast to the south-east of central Laguna Beach, away from areas becoming more popular with visitors.

Guy Rose also painted along this section of coast, as shown in his Laguna Trees from about 1916. These are seen looking to the north-west over the bay, in a Mediterranean light.

Rose’s Carmel Dunes from about 1918-20, shows unspoilt land near Carmel-by-the-Sea, in a small bay to the south of Monterey, on the coast south of San Jose. Carmel wasn’t developed until the early twentieth century, and still only has a resident population of three thousand. It was featured in the International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, but has never been developed in the way that many other resorts along this coast have.

At the end of the war, Rose painted this Monterey Cypress as if influenced by the paintings of twisted trees along the French Mediterranean coast.

Granville Redmond’s later paintings include a few moonlit motifs, such as this of the Catalina Island Coast under a Moonlit Sky in 1920. Redmond became a close friend of the movie actor Charlie Chaplin. Catalina, or Santa Catalina, Island is about 35 km (22 miles) off the coast of California, south of Los Angeles. Redmond’s sky is formed from innumerable short, fine brushstrokes in apparently random directions, and gives the effect of the atmospheric buzz of small insects, contrasting with the dark mass of rock.

Steamer leaving Avalon, Catalina Island (1920) is a small and painterly sketch in oils on cardboard made by Redmond during his visits to the island. The small town (officially a city!) of Avalon is situated on its natural harbour, and has grown from tents and three wooden huts in 1883 to a modern resort now attracting a million visitors every year. Its development for tourists started in the late 1880s, but when Redmond visited in 1920 it had recently been purchased by the chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr, who opened a casino there in 1929.

Redmond’s Malibu Coast, Spring from about 1929 shows the 21 mile beach of this coastal resort thirty miles to the west of central Los Angeles, in the summer with golden poppies and purple lupines in full flower. At this time, Malibu was only just starting development, with the small Malibu Colony and a ceramic tile factory which had been funded by May K Rindge, owner of the land.

William Frederic Ritschel’s wonderfully rough Carmel-by-the-Sea Seascape was painted in 1930.

Paul Dougherty painted this section of California Cliffs after 1935, in calmer conditions more conducive to working en plein air.

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.