As we near the end of this alphabet of landscape painting, this week we reach the letter y, standing for yellow, one of the most important and versatile colours in the artist’s palette. It’s most strongly associated with late summer, when much of the countryside has become dry and turned from the green of Spring to the yellows of ripened grain, ready for harvest.

Perhaps the earliest complete visual reference to the grain harvest is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters from 1565. This shows each step in the traditional and labour-intensive processes of cutting the ripe crop, gathering it into stooks, transporting it by cart for threshing, and onward transfer of grain to the waiting ships in the far distance.

In 1826, the young British painter Samuel Palmer moved to the rural village of Shoreham in Kent, in the valley of the River Darent to the north of Sevenoaks, where he spent much of the next decade producing some of his most distinctive work. For Palmer, the village and its environs became his ‘land of milk and honey’, in a Biblical vision of Beulah. His finely-detailed Oak Trees, Lullingstone Park was painted two years later, in 1828. This shows ancient oaks in the deer park of Lullingstone Castle, in the Darent Valley of Kent, between Eynsford and Shoreham, with their leaves turned yellow in the early autumn.

Towards the end of his time in Shoreham, Palmer’s views started to open out into more conventional landscapes, such as The Golden Valley (c 1833-34), caught here at the end of the harvest.

Painted three centuries after Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s encyclopaedic account, Charles-François Daubigny’s Harvest from 1851 is remarkably similar, although its yellows are more muted.

Further afield, in the vast cereal-growing lands of Ukraine, Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine (1880) shows laborious hand-cutting of grain on the steppe, and demonstrates the origin of the Ukrainian flag of blue and yellow.

Mykola Pymonenko’s classic view of Harvest in Ukraine from 1896 follows a compositional formula developed by Jules Bastien-Lepage for Naturalist paintings. Its horizon is high, about three-quarters of the way up the canvas. The women in the foreground and the child’s cradle are painted in fine detail, and their edges are so crisp that they pop out. As the figures and fields recede into the background, they rapidly lose detail and their edges blur. The effect is of a vivid reality at the focus of the image, with deep recession to the distant horizon.

Camille Pissarro started work on his intensely sensory and idyllic painting The Gleaners in early 1888, using a squared-up study in gouache to finalise his composition. He found the Divisionist technique hard, and wrote that he needed models so that he could complete its detail, which he did later the following year.

British painter Adrian Stokes travelled to Romania in eastern Europe for this golden view of Harvest Time in Transylvania (c 1909), one of many paintings he and his wife Marianne made of their protracted visits.

Grant Wood’s Fall Plowing from 1931 is set in the prairie of Iowa, where it shows ripe and harvested cereals, and a recently developed walking plough with a steel ploughshare, an important advance in cultivating the prairie.

Henry Herbert La Thangue painted In the Orchard in 1893, presumably in Sussex, England, using a profusion of fine marks more typical of Impressionism. Although the figures and baskets of fruit are quite tightly detailed, much of the rest of his canvas is more painterly and atmospheric.

Yellow has also been used in combination with blues and greens to create colours closer to those in nature. In some cases, even into the twentieth century, the yellow used hasn’t proved lightfast, and has faded to leave foliage appearing blue.

This is all too sadly evident in Adriaen van de Velde’s otherwise superb Vertumnus and Pomona from 1670.

Carl Blechen used lightfast chrome yellow extensively in his imposing View of Assisi, painted in 1832-35. By this time, the mixture of chrome yellow with Prussian blue had become known as green cinnabar or chrome green, although the chromium salt used was yellow in colour, not green.

Chrome yellow was widely used by the Impressionists and shown at the Salon, and is demonstrated well in Paul Cézanne’s famous painting of The Railway Cutting (c 1870). Most if not all of the greens seen here most probably rely on chrome yellow mixed with blue.

In this alphabet of landscape painting, we’ve covered two of the four ancient elements, in earth and various bodies of water, but not yet touched on air. Therefore the letter w is for wind, a real challenge to paint.

The most florid paintings of wind are in seascapes, where its effects are most immediate.

JMW Turner was one of the great masters of the shipwreck/storm maritime scene. My favourite example is this Snow Storm, Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). This was the work for which it was claimed that Turner had himself lashed to the mast so that he could observe the storm properly, almost certainly false and quite unnecessary anyway: as a seasoned Channel traveller, Turner would have had ample previous experience. This also shows one of Turner’s most distinctive features in painting storms, the vortex, with his subject seen in its central eye. Although not exactly natural, it has proved atmospheric.

Peder Balke takes advantage of the rich clues provided in The Harbor at Skjervøy (c 1844-46). In this small fishing port in Troms, in the far north of Norway, the wind fills the sky with wheeling seabirds, heels the yachts, turns the sea white from breaking waves, and drives distant smoke almost horizontally.

Clarkson Frederick Stanfield made his reputation from marine paintings showing the effects of wind and waves. In the summer of 1843, he toured the Netherlands, finding fresh motifs for his oil paintings, including Oude Scheld – Texel Island, Looking towards Nieuwe Diep and the Zuider Zee, completed in his studio the following year. Its fragmented clouds are paralleled by the frequent small waves, together building the effect of a brisk offshore breeze. The critics loved it.

Late in his career, Gustave Courbet’s coastal paintings came to concentrate on waves breaking on the beach, as in his Autumn Sea from 1867, where two sailing boats are the only forms to punctuate its horizon. They are heeling in the wind, which is also starting to blow the tops off the waves, as those dirty clouds scud rapidly across the sky.

On land, though, the painter has to work harder to convince the viewer, enlisting the help of trees and their foliage, and even washing hung out to dry.

Thomas Gainsborough’s sketchy Landscape with Cottage and Church (1771-72) is one of the first works to use angled highlights over the foliage of trees to make them appear as if they’re moving in the wind, and its style was far ahead of its time.

Although trees are a help when depicting wind, Daubigny’s undated October manages very well with the tell-tale smoke rising from burning stubble.

Gustave Courbet shows how a ‘leaning’ sky can amplify the windswept branches, in The Gust of Wind from about 1865.

Although it depicts more extreme conditions, Jean-François Millet’s Gust of Wind from 1871-73 must be the canonical painting of a storm. Its lone and distant figure is being blown almost double, as he’s nearly struck by a large branch torn from the tree to the left. Indeed, that tree is being uprooted, and its leaves pepper the storm sky at dawn.

Antônio Parreiras’ wonderful Ventania (The Windstorm) (1888) is not as extreme, but just as eloquent, again using a leaning sky to accentuate the arcs formed by the trees.

With the Impressionist emphasis on transient effects of light rather than weather, their paintings tend to be more subtle again, as shown in Claude Monet’s Poplars (Wind Effect) from 1891.

Some of the most effective aids for the depiction of wind are flags and drying washing. While Sisley used the former, Gustave Caillebotte painted two views in which a washing line gives the strongest clue as to the wind. This is his Laundry Drying, Petit Gennevilliers (1892), the windier of the two.

Following his time at Cullercoats in England painting fisherfolk there, Winslow Homer’s simple and effective watercolour of Hurricane, Bahamas (1898) should come as no surprise.

Although not famous as a landscape painter, Franz von Stuck’s Storm Landscape (c 1920) leaves the viewer in no doubt.