In the first of these two articles celebrating the work of generations of women who washed clothes and linen outdoors, and have been featured in landscape paintings, I covered the period up to the end of the 1870s, when Impressionism was at its height. This account resumes at about 1880, and moves on to the early twentieth century.

Alice Havers’ Washerwomen, which given her tragically brief life must have been painted around 1880, shows a wide range of ages, working together, some repairing the clothes, others talking. On the other side of the river, the fruit trees are in blossom.

Later in Eugène Boudin’s career he painted Washerwomen by the River (c 1880-85), above, and Laundresses on the Beach, Low Tide, Aval Cliff, Étretat (c 1890-94), below. The latter painting is remarkable for its rough facture, and for the number of women gathered by one of the most recognisable landmarks on the Normandy coast, the arch of Étretat.

Early in his career, the American artist Charles Courtney Curran painted a series of works showing young women at work outdoors, among which the most successful, A Breezy Day (1887) won the Third Hallgarten Prize for Oils from the National Academy of Design the following year.

Painted when Vincent van Gogh was at Arles, one of his best-known groups of works includes The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing (1888). This is one of four oil paintings, a watercolour, and at least four drawings he made of this motif, with the aid of a perspective frame he had made for himself. This shows a traditional wooden drawbridge, one of several over the canal running from Arles to Bouc. Built in the early nineteenth century, it was sadly replaced by concrete in 1930.

In the same year, Paul Gauguin painted a group of women hard at work near Arles in his Washerwomen of Arles I (1888).

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Laundress (1891) sets a single, quite well-dressed woman doing her washing in one of his sumptuously soft-focus landscapes.

The Norwegian painter Jahn Ekenæs teaches us that, even in the bitter Nordic winters, the washing still had to be done: his Women Doing Laundry Through a Hole in the Ice (1891) seem to have the toughest job of all. Note that only one of them is wearing anything on her hands.

Peder Mørk Mønsted’s Laundry Day (1899) shows kinder conditions during the summer, when doing the washing would surely have been a more popular task.

In common with many of these paintings, Manuel Garcia y Rodriguez uses the white of the linen heightened in sunshine to generate contrast, in his White and Black. Andalucian Landscape. Laundresses in the River Guadaíra from 1903.

As indoor domestic water supplies became widespread during the twentieth century, washing clothing and linen in the countryside died out, and vanished from the landscape.

For z, the last letter in this alphabet of landscape painting, I offer a small selection of the very finest works that form the zeitgeist of the genre in Western art.

Landscape of the Danube near Regensburg is one of Albrecht Altdorfer’s five known pure landscape paintings, and was made between about 1528-30. This develops repoussoir, following the foreground – middle distance – far distance convention, with a low horizon to accommodate the framing trees and allow a dramatic cloudscape, laying the foundation for so many landscapes of the future.

Landscape with a Calm from about 1651 is one of Nicolas Poussin’s late pure landscape paintings, of a view that never existed except in the artist’s imagination, although there’s something familiar about each of the elements within it. Like an Advent calendar, it contains scattered scenes which the viewer is tempted to try to construct into a coherent narrative, but are probably all part of the painting’s mode.

In the foreground is a herdsman with his dog, tending to a small flock of goats, which are grazing erratically at the borders of a track meandering down to the lake. The only distinctive feature of the man, indeed of this whole passage, is how non-descript he is. He has nothing that could be interpreted as an attribute, and gives no clue as to his identity. The most prominent feature of the painting is its large Italianate villa. In front of its outermost earthworks, two herdsmen tend a flock of sheep and cattle. The man on the left is playing bagpipes. There are figures scattered just outside and within the grounds of the villa, and two visible at its ground floor windows. There is nothing which appears to be out of the ordinary here either.

All the clues given by the artist point towards the mode of calm and peace in this landscape. Its one small burst of activity is a galloping horse. The air is so calm that the lake reflects like a mirror, and one tiny patch of broken water stands out.

An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (c 1636) is one of Peter Paul Rubens larger landscapes from the end of his career. As the sun is rising off to the right, a man drives a cart, on top of which a woman is perched precariously, away from Ruben’s castellated mansion. Beside that stream, a hunter is stalking game with his gun and dog.

A small group of people are on the grass in front of the house: a woman is seated, perhaps nursing an infant; next to her is another woman, and a man. Another man is fishing in the moat, from the bridge which connects its main entrance with the outside world. At the far right, a milkmaid walks out to a small herd of cows. There are birds in the sky, and some small tits and others on the scrub in the foreground. Beyond, a great plain of meadows and woods sweeps far to the horizon. The day has begun.

The similarities in his composition with those of nearly twenty years earlier are remarkable. However, there’s one big difference: while undoubtedly idealised, this painting is based on a real and known geographical location just outside the city of Antwerp.

Some landscape painters, including Jacob van Ruisdael, turned their canvases to make portraits of towering clouds, as in his View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields from about 1665. The distant town of Haarlem with its monumentally large church of Saint Bavo – works of man – is dwarfed by these high cumulus clouds, the works of God. This motif proved so popular that van Ruisdael painted many variants of the same view, making it now one of the most widespread landscapes across the galleries of Europe.

Before Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes sketched in oils in front of his motifs in the Roman Campagna, in around 1782, very few landscape paintings were made in front of the motif. Valenciennes not only assembled himself a library of sketches such as this magnificent View of Rome, but wrote an influential treatise advocating this as a technique. This paved the way for greater fidelity in views and ultimately Impressionism.

JMW Turner’s Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino from 1839 anticipates Impressionist style. It retains several conventional features, though, using repoussoir at the right, and a parade of buildings to lead the eye past the mass of the Colosseum into the distant mist. He uses staffage extensively in the foreground, with a group of three goats at the right and sundry figures at the left. As this is a view from elevation looking down, the horizon is for once well above its midline.

Claude Monet’s masterwork Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil from 1873 is a textbook example of a river landscape in autumn painted in high Impressionist style, with high chroma and loose brushstrokes.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Wave, painted on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1882, is inspired by the ukiyo-e print of Hokusai’s Great Wave, and takes Impressionism to its limits in the dissolution of form.

In the late nineteenth century, landscape painters including Camille Pissarro transferred their attention to cities like Paris, in his case primarily because of eye problems. In January 1897, Pissarro painted from a hotel room overlooking the Rue Saint-Lazare, then in February transferred to a room with a view over the Boulevard Montmartre, where he painted some of his finest cityscapes. His Boulevard Montmartre, Spring Morning (1897) is composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around.

Ferdinand Hodler’s view of Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light, painted a few months before he died in 1918, completed his reduction of this view into bands consisting of water coloured by the sky, a zone of blue reflections of the far bank, the merged distant shore and mountains, and the sky.

Paul Nash’s Eclipse of the Sunflower (1945) was inspired by William Blake’s poem Ah! Sunflower, from his Songs of Experience (1794):

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Nash shows a sunflower undergoing an eclipse, as if a celestial body. Below is a windswept sea and the coast of Dorset, as he had painted below the ‘flying boat’ in his Defence of Albion in 1942. Just above that coast are more peculiar botanical structures relating to the sunflower, and behind is the threatening sky of an imminent storm.

I hope you have enjoyed this series celebrating different aspects of landscape painting.

If paintings of swimmers have been rare in narrative, they have been landmarks elsewhere, where some of the most significant paintings in the Impressionist canon are those painted by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir of a popular swimming resort near Paris.

In the summer of 1869, Renoir lived at his parents house in Louveciennes, where the Pissarros were also renting a house. He visited the Monets, who were living near Bougival, and often painted alongside Claude Monet. Some of the formative moments in Impressionism if not European art occurred when Monet and Renoir visited the popular bathing houses on the Seine known as La Grenouillère. Here Monet gave an early statement of his Impressionist agenda, a plein air oil sketch originally intended to be turned into a finished painting for submission to the Salon the following year. The pair then realised that Impressionism was about these sketched instants.

Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869) is one of the most significant paintings now in London’s National Gallery, and features rows of swimmers in the river beyond the wooden pier crossing the middle of its canvas.

Renoir painted at least three different views of La Grenouillère that summer: that above is now in Stockholm, and that below, most similar to Monet’s, is in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Switzerland; the third (not shown) is in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

That same summer, Frédéric Bazille started painting a smaller group of young men swimming.

Bazille began this Summer Scene, also known as Bathers, when he was on holiday in Montpellier during the summer of 1869. He had already made a series of compositional studies, from as early as February that year, but when he was working on the canvas, he didn’t find it easy going.

He eventually opted for a composition based on strong diagonals, in which the bathers in the foreground are in shade, while the two wrestlers in the distance are lit by sunshine. The landscape background was painted from the hot green mixture of grass with birch and pine trees, typical of the banks of the River Lez. He completed this painting in early 1870, and it was accepted for the Salon of that year, where it was well-received by the critics. Later that year, he was killed in the Franco-Prussian War.

On the other side of the Atlantic, swimmers also earned their place in the history of art.

In 1885, Thomas Eakins painted Swimming (The Swimming Hole), appreciated today as one of the most important paintings in American art, and a masterpiece in the depiction of human form. There’s a deep irony in his choice of subject, that Eakins undoubtedly recognised. The same public who were shocked at a painting of naked people, or painting nude models in an art class, were quite used to seeing naked men swimming, even in public places. That was an accepted norm, so long as you didn’t take it into the studio or art class. This work was commissioned, and perhaps inevitably was refused, although the artist was still paid in full.

George Bellows’ Forty-two Kids from 1907 shows unruly youths at play by the water, in apparent homage to Eakins’ Swimming, restaged in this urban setting.

Several of the French artists who had moved to the Midi (the south of France) were experimenting with the use of photography, and this appears to have influenced Henri-Edmond Cross in his Bathers or Happy Bathing, which he started painting in 1899 and completed in 1902. Despite his chroma nearing Fauvist levels, Cross has retained his subtlety in the gradation and transition of colour.

Also in 1902, Lovis Corinth visited the south coast of the Baltic, where he painted Swimming in Horst – Ostsee, now the Polish resort of Niechorze.

Back in warmer waters, Joaquín Sorolla’s The White Boat, Jávea, was painted during his summer campaign on the coast to the south of Valencia in 1905.

Among the few paintings of Maurice Denis featuring nudes is Wave from 1916, with their forced classical poses.

Finally, one of Aksel Waldemar Johannessen’s earliest surviving paintings is a startling view of two swimmers.

Man on a Diving Board from 1912 shows a well-muscled man in bathing trunks bending forward as he sits on the end of a diving board. Below him, just under the surface of the water, is a young woman wearing a bright red costume, including a hat.

Just as humans have always wanted to fly, the ability has commonly been ascribed to those elevated to the status of god or goddess. While some systems of belief have been happy to award all their deities the power of flight, it was more restricted in those of the ancient Mediterranean civilisations responsible for most of the myths painted in European art.

Charles-Antoine Coypel’s Fury of Achilles from 1737 captures Achilles, wearing his elaborate armour in the centre, as he’s being aided in the war against Troy by Athena on the left and Hephaestus on the right. Further to the right is Scamander, shown traditionally with his large jar gushing water and a wooden paddle in his right hand. Beneath them are the bodies of Trojans, and the river is starting to run red with their blood. In the more distant chariot is Hera with one of her peacocks.

More generally, though, unlimited free flight was confined to Hermes/Mercury, messenger of the gods, Cupid, and those personifying features of the sky, including the winds, heavenly bodies such as rainbows (Iris, another divine messenger), and events like night.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted The Judgement of Paris late in his long career, in 1908-10. Its three slightly soft-focus nudes are shown against a blurry background of countryside. Paris has accepted Aphrodite’s bribe, and is here awarding her the golden apple. Watching on is Hermes, complete with his winged helmet and sandals signifying his flying ability, and his distinctive caduceus.

The sixth painting in Edward Burne-Jones’ Perseus series, The Death of Medusa II (1881-2), completes the story of Medusa by showing the hero fleeing from the Gorgons. The headless body of Medusa is left on the ground, and her sisters fly around searching for her assailant. Perseus wears the helmet of Hades to maintain his invisibility, and is flying away with his borrowed winged sandals, while inserting Medusa’s head in his kibisis.

Sandro Botticelli’s huge masterpiece Primavera (Spring) demonstrates this differentiation, in its retelling of the story of Zephyrus and Flora. The west wind (far right, and detail below) abducted and raped the nymph Chloris (to the left of him), who was then transformed into the goddess Flora, who is dressed and decked in flowers, representing the Spring. Only Zephyrus as a wind, and Cupid above, are shown in flight.

Charles William Mitchell’s The Flight of Boreas with Orithyia from 1893 gives a full and classical account of this myth. Orithyia is trying to push the head of her abductor away, and unfasten his right hand from her thigh, but Boreas is just about to take her airborne.

Another deity whose role in mythology depends on her ability to fly is Eris, whose spreading of discord among the goddesses was key to the origin of the war against Troy.

In Jacob Jordaens’ Golden Apple of Discord (1633), the facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just made her gift of the golden apple, now at the centre of the grasping hands above the table. At the left, Minerva (Pallas Athene) reaches forward for it. In front of her, Aphrodite, her son Eros at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Hera reaches her hand out for it too.

Flying ability wasn’t evenly distributed in Norse mythology either, but was a skill best developed among valkyries.

Edward Robert Hughes’ first work showing a valkyrie from Norse mythology, Dream Idyll (A Valkyrie) from 1902, depicts a naked and unarmed woman riding a winged horse in the sky over a late Victorian city, perhaps London.

This has perpetuated into more recent myths and legends of fairies and related little creatures.

This Allegorical Scene looks like one of the more extreme faerie works from Victorian Britain, but was painted by Domenicus van Wijnen almost two centuries earlier. At the upper right, hundreds of small putti-like fairies are being ejected from below, flying in an arc over the top of the painting, and coalescing around a goddess lit brightly from behind. Below her is a river, where large numbers of naked bathers are congregated, and they too appear to rise up into the sky in another stream of flying figures.

These have been perpetuated in Christian beliefs in the form of angels, whose wings have more ancient and pre-Christian origins.

Hieronymus Bosch’s panel Ascent of the Blessed is one of the four making up his Visions of the Hereafter (c 1505-15), with particularly original and beautiful winged angels. These wings enable clear distinction to be made between humans and other human-like creatures, and the messengers of God. Being messengers, just as older gods like Eros, Thanatos, and Vanth before them, there’s a feasible rationale for them requiring their wings in order to move swiftly from heaven or the pre-Christian underworld to earth, and in their duties on earth.

There are even a few instances of divine and saintly figures being awarded the gift of flight.

William Blake’s unusual Nativity of 1799-1800 shows Joseph (left) supporting the Virgin Mary, who appears to have fainted. Jesus has somehow sprung from her womb, and hovers, arms outstretched as if ready for crucifixion, in mid-air. On the right, Mary’s cousin Elisabeth greets the infant, with her own son, John the Baptist, on her lap.

The occasional saint has been awarded their licence to fly, as shown here in the figure of Saint Mark in Tintoretto’s early success Miracle of the Slave from 1548. Here the artist’s intention is not just about motion, but about the act of flying, and the figure’s saintliness or divinity.