This weekend, come over to our house on the Isle of Wight. It’s usually lovely at this time of year, before the season’s rush of tourists. To save you the high cost of the ferry crossing, claimed by many to be the most expensive stretch of water in the world, and sleeping on our floor, your visit comes courtesy of a succession of artists, from intrepid Danish explorers to Berthe Morisot, the French Impressionist.

The south coast of England is known for its white cliffs, which become steadily more spectacular as the coast reaches the Isle of Wight. The most famous landmark here is the Needles, chalk sea stacks that have been both a welcome and a hazard to mariners over the centuries.

These were presumably one of the first sights of Europe when Philipp Georg Friedrich von Reck returned from his pioneering stay in North America in 1736. The sea in this page from his sketchbook may appear a little overwrought, but it’s faithful: this channel in the Western Solent is home to one of the more spectacular tidal races of the Channel coasts, and often generates short, steep waves over a metre in height.

The Needles also form the backdrop to JMW Turner’s early success of Fishermen at Sea from 1796. This shows small fishing boats working in heavy swell off The Needles, and was his first oil painting to be exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Closer examination of the painting reveals that, even at this early stage in his career, Turner wasn’t painting motifs quite as they were in nature: from the position of The Needles, this view would look to the south-west from Totland Bay. Yet he shows the distant promontories of the south-west coast of the Island, as if the view was made round the other side of The Needles in Freshwater Bay looking south-east instead. Another group of chalk sea-stacks was located there, with some common appearances to those at The Needles, and it’s probable that Turner merged them and added the background from the south-west coast.

Clarkson Stanfield’s view was engraved as The Needles in 1836. This is a more accurate depiction of this landmark at that time, before the famous lighthouse was built in an effort to prevent ships wrecking on the submerged ledges here.

The bay behind the closest chalk pinnacle is Scratchell’s Bay, and the wall of chalk at the back of it forms a huge shield, with dark veins running exactly as shown here. Stanfield must have painted his original work from sketches made in a boat hove to just to the west of the Needles.

When William Dyce was on the island painting a fresco (shown tomorrow) at Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s holiday palace there, he took a few hours off to paint this fine watercolour sketch of a view across Sandown Bay to another chalk landmark, Culver Cliff, here seen from low down on the beach at Shanklin.

In the following decade, two of the lesser-known Pre-Raphaelite landscape painters painted the same bay from a more elevated viewpoint.

Richard Burchett’s View Across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight was painted from the path which still runs to the west of Saint John’s Church (now known as Saint Blasius’), Shanklin, towards Cliff Copse, and on to the village in which I live.

James Collinson’s Mother and Child by a Stile, with Culver Cliff, Isle of Wight, in the Distance was painted further up and west along that path, at the eastern end of Cliff Copse. It’s claimed that either or both the views were made from above or beyond Shanklin Down, which is incorrect: they were both made to the north-east of that down, which towers above those locations.

For some time, I believed that there were two significant discrepancies between these paintings and the views these artists would have seen: the distant white tower, the Earl of Yarborough’s Monument, appeared too far to the left in both, and in Burchett’s painting, Saint John’s Church looked incorrect. Although I still have my doubts about the church, and the exact site from which Collinson painted his view, I have since discovered that the distant monument is placed correctly, as it was moved from there to its present location in the 1860s.

At Ventnor, Isle of Wight (1856) is a superb watercolour painted by Barbara Bodichon on the coast just a few miles to the south-west of where I live. It conforms to the Pre-Raphaelite expectations of landscape painting, and captures the spirit and detail of the chalk cliffs along this stretch of the Channel coast. Painted from near Saint Catherine’s Point, in a friend’s studio, looking east into the dawn sky, it was successfully exhibited at the Royal Academy.

During the winter of 1885-86, the patron of another Pre-Raphaelite painter, John Brett, stayed on or near the Isle of Wight, where the artist’s new boat had been built. Brett painted two watercolour landscapes of the Island, of which only February in the Isle of Wight (1866) has been traced.

Whistler was another nineteenth century artist who found himself in the area during the winter, in his case in 1872. Although I’m not aware that he visited the island, he did travel on the long broad estuary connecting the port of Southampton to the Solent, where he painted this Nocturne: Blue and Gold — Southampton Water (1872). The Isle of Wight is the thin sliver of land on the horizon by the sun, which appears to be rising not setting.

The summer after Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet married in Paris, they holidayed on the Isle of Wight.

The Manets stayed in Cowes, on the northern tip of the island, where she painted many oil sketches of yachts in harbour, and this portrait of her husband Eugène Manet on Isle of Wight (1875).

Tomorrow we’ll see more of those yachts in Cowes.