In the first of these two articles looking at the reading of lightning in paintings, I showed examples drawn from mythical and religious narratives. Today I start with a symbolic use, then consider the depiction of lightning in landscape art.

Just as in spoken language, images of thunderstorms and lightning may have symbolic or allegorical meaning. For Maxim Vorobiev, Oak Fractured by a Lightning Stroke (1842) formed an allegory of his wife’s death. Although painted at the dawn of photography, Vorobiev couldn’t have had the benefit of images of lightning with brief exposure times, and his accurate representation can only have come from observation.

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.

The founding fathers of landscape painting in the Northern Renaissance weren’t to be outdone by 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.

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.

Francisque Millet was a seventeenth-century Flemish landscape artist who followed in Poussin’s manner, but painted views less idealised and closer to topographical reality. His Mountain Landscape with Lightning from about 1675 shows a violent but localised storm far away from his native Low Countries, and closer to the Alps, which he may well have crossed when he travelled to Italy.

Eugène Delacroix painted this dramatic watercolour of a Horse Frightened by Lightning in 1825-29. The heavy clouds have made it almost as dark as night, and the contortion of his rearing stallion enhances the effect.

For realist painters of the middle and late nineteenth century, awe and impact were to be achieved by less romantic and more objective accounts.

Dry prairies can catch alight when struck by lightning, as in this scene painted by Charles Deas in his 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 is unimpressive, but is close behind these three people riding two horses in their flight.

Perhaps the safest place to be during a thunderstorm is indoors, where you can stand and marvel at the sight outdoors.

In painting six from Louis Janmot’s Poem of the Soul, Fatherly Roof, his subject’s family are at home during a thunderstorm, shown by the flashes of lightning at the window. Grandmother reads a psalm to calm the spirit, while the mother and another young woman sit and sew. Father (a self-portrait at the age of thirty) looks on with concern. An even older woman, perhaps the great-grandmother, sits in the shadows near the window.