In the first article of this pair looking at paintings of windmills, I covered traditional views up to the first of the pre-Impressionists. This article takes this account from around 1850 up to the period between the two World Wars. Although the development of steam power during the nineteenth century brought great changes to many industries, windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the century, and even then they only declined gradually until the Second World War.

Samuel Palmer’s Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they are being driven by the rising wind.

Windmill styles differ outside northern Europe. When Jean-Léon Gérôme travelled down the River Danube in about 1855, he claimed to have witnessed this moving scene of Recreation in a Russian Camp, Remembering Moldavia (1855). A group of Russian soldiers in low spirits is being uplifted by making music, under the direction of their superior. Gérôme has captured an atmosphere which few of his other paintings achieved: the marvellous light of the sky, the skein of geese on the wing, and the parade of windmills in the distance, all draw together with the soldiers in their sombre greatcoats.

The following year, JC Dahl’s Burning Windmill at Stege is an unusual fire-painting following a traditional sub-genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Although painted well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature.

During the winter of 1864, Johan Jongkind returned to the Netherlands, where he painted this Winter View with Skaters, which is more overtly pre-Impressionist.

Jongkind’s watercolour sketch of a Windmill at Antwerp of 1866 is even more painterly.

Claude Monet’s second visit to the Netherlands in 1874 ensured that The Windmill on the Onbekende Gracht, Amsterdam (1874) became a part of the history of Impressionism. This shows a windmill known as Het Land van Beloften, De Eendracht or De Binnen Tuchthuismolen, which was built in the late seventeenth century, and was moved from there to Utrecht just a couple of years after Monet painted it on the banks of the River Amstel.

Frits Thaulow’s painstakingly detailed View of Amerikavej in Copenhagen (1881) shows a windmill in the background, where it’s being used to provide power to the adjacent industrial site.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Ukrainian Landscape from 1882 shows one of the distinctive windmills on the elevated bank alongside a major river and its more populated floodplain to the right.

It may not have been Monet who first made the visual association between Dutch windmills and fields of tulips in flower, but his 1886 painting of Tulip Field in Holland must be its best-known depiction.

When Vincent van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886, he stayed with his brother Theo in Montmartre. He painted a series of marvellous views of the remaining windmills there, including the most famous of them all, Le Moulin de la Galette (1887), in whose gardens Renoir had painted his Bal du moulin de la Galette a decade earlier.

Paul Signac’s Rotterdam. The Windmill. The Canal. Morning (1906) is a Divisionist view of a windmill in the centre of this major port.

It was a Dutch painter who took windmills from Impressionism to the modernist styles of the twentieth century: Piet Mondrian.

Piet Mondrian’s gentle nocturne of Oostzijdse Mill on the River Gein by Moonlight from about 1903 is one of several views of windmills that he painted in Impressionist and post-Impressionist style.

When he started experimenting with vibrant colour and patterned brushstrokes in about 1908, this painting of a Mill in Sunlight marks his point of departure.

The Red Mill (1911) continues Mondrian’s move towards areas of flat colour. That year he left the windmills of Amsterdam and moved to Paris. To mark his move into the avant garde of that city, he dropped the second ‘a’ from his surname, going from Mondriaan to Mondrian. He became increasingly influenced by Georges Bracque and the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso, and the purely abstract paintings for which he remains well-known today.

Serhii Svitoslavskyi’s Ukrainian Landscape with Windmills, probably from about 1911, shows a small cluster of windmills with grazing livestock.

By the end of the First World War, milling grain had become more centralised, and the hundreds of thousands of small windmills across northern Europe lost their business. A few have been preserved, and some are still used for specialist products such as stoneground flour. But the unmistakable sight of a windmill on the skyline had been lost from much of the land.

During the 1930s, the Raviliouses started spending time in Sussex, where they became close friends with Peggy Angus, whose house The Furlongs at Beddingham, East Sussex, became a second home. Eric Ravilious became particularly fond of painting the chalk downs there, as in his Windmill (1934). This isn’t a windmill in the traditional sense, but a smaller wind-driven pump to extract water from the chalk, mainly for irrigation.

Think of Norway and you envisage fjords, but the best-known paintings of the country show its capital Oslo, in Edvard Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan and The Scream. This weekend we’re off to spend a couple of days visiting the streets of the city today, and the surrounding countryside tomorrow.

Oslo became a capital around 1300, and was originally centred on its royal residence and the mediaeval Akershus Fortress built to defend it. Much of the old city was destroyed by fire in 1624, so was rebuilt and renamed Christiania in honour of its King Christian IV. From 1877, when it was growing as a trading port, it was officially respelled as Kristiania, and was only renamed Oslo in 1925.

This map shows the relatively small urban area as it was in 1887. It’s situated at the northern end of Oslofjord, that broadens as it runs south to open into the eastern side of the North Sea opposite the artists’ colony at Skagen in Denmark. Most of its major buildings date from the nineteenth century, when it acquired its Royal Palace, parliament, university and commercial centre. Its population grew rapidly from less than ten thousand at the start of that century to nearly a quarter of a million by its end.

The centre of the city is dominated by its best-known street, Karl Johan, running from the Royal Palace in the west to the central railway station in the east.

Christian Krohg’s Struggle for Existence (also translated as The Struggle for Survival) from 1889 shows Karl Johan in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread. They are wrapped up in patched and tatty clothing, clutching baskets and other containers in which to put the food. A disembodied hand is passing a single bread roll out to them, from within the pillars at the left edge. That was yesterday’s bread; now stale, the baker is giving it away only because he cannot sell it. A policeman, wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, walks in the distance, down the middle of the icy street, detached from the scene.

Edvard Munch painted numerous views of this street, here Karl Johan in the Rain from 1891. This shows it rising up towards the Royal Palace in the distance, with its pavements crowded with black umbrellas.

Munch’s famous Evening on Karl Johan from the following year was originally just known as Evening. This looks from the Royal Palace towards Storting (the parliament building) with greatly foreshortened perspective to pack the pedestrians together and instil a deep sense of anxiety.

Christian Krohg’s wife Oda painted this wonderful Portrait of Christian Krohg in about 1903. Although made during their years in Paris, it shows the artist by the Grand Café on Karl Johan, as a military band marches along the tramlines.

Munch continued to paint through the 1930s, although little of his work from those years is well known. Summer on Karl Johan Street, Oslo (1933) shows how much his style continued to evolve, and contrasts with his earlier dark, anxious and melancholic scenes. This view is from the west end of Karl Johan, close to the Royal Palace.

When Frits Thaulow returned to Norway at the end of the nineteenth century he painted several views of the Akerselva or Akerselven River running through industrial buildings in the eastern part of the city centre. Those include The Akerselven River in the Snow, probably painted between 1897-1901.

This is Thaulow’s atmospheric pastel of Winter in Akerselva from about 1897.

In 1912, Thorolf Holmboe painted another section of the river in Akerselva by Marselis’ gate. This is a more modern apartment block well to the north of the central station.

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen was born and brought up in the poor suburb of Hammersborg, to the north of Karl Johan.

During the early years of the twentieth century, Johannessen painted colourful street scenes of the city, such as this Market Scene from about 1916.

Johannessen’s Mother and Child (1918-20) is set in the Hammersborg district, where a care-worn working class mother is seen walking out at night, her young child held firmly within her shawl.

Gudmund Stenersen’s contrasting Sunday in Majorstuen from 1921 shows this more affluent suburb at the western edge of the city, where construction didn’t start until the end of the nineteenth century, when the railway reached it and made commuting easy. This winter’s day is sufficiently snowy for many of these folk to be carrying their cross-country skis, and one woman in the foreground is still skiing on hers.