Lighthouses are dotted around the coast of even the most remote places. This weekend I’m going to visit a few of them in paintings: today in the pleasant weather that we might find them at this time of year, then tomorrow in conditions when the lighthouse is called upon to do its job, and protect mariners from shipwreck.

Claude-Joseph Vernet’s Calm at a Mediterranean Port (1770) shows a stretch of idealised Italianate coastline bathed in the golden light of dusk on a calm evening, a gentle breeze blowing the pendants of the fully-rigged ship. A lighthouse dominates the entrance to its harbour.

John Constable’s Harwich: The Low Lighthouse and Beacon Hill is one of his finished landscapes completed in about 1820. Harwich is a major port on the east coast of England, and its lighthouses have primarily functioned to guide ships coming into its harbour, their original purpose in ancient times. Here he shows the old Low Light standing on the foreshore, which was replaced in 1818 by a stone building. He must therefore have made his studies for this work before that replacement was built. There is also a High Light, situated further inland, dating back to an original light from 1665.

Christian Morgenstern (Christian Ernst Bernhard Morgenstern, to distinguish him from the slightly later author of similar name) was a major artistic influence in the development of Realist landscape painting in Germany. He painted a few nocturnes, of which his Helgoland in Moonlight from 1851 is his best and most dramatic coastal view.

The first lighthouse built here dates from 1630. This replacement was built in 1810-11 by the British government, who had just assumed responsibility for the island of Heligoland, and was dubbed the English lighthouse as a result.

François Musin’s undated Old Lighthouse with Shrimpers shows one of a series of lighthouses built at Knokke, amid sand dunes on the coast of Belgium. The artist has depicted the dunes as if they are liquid, like the sea, and dunes and sea merge in the foreground.

Claude Monet moved to the port of Le Havre, on the Channel coast of France, when he was only four years old, and it was there that he grew up and started his career as a painter. He made The Mouth of the Seine, Honfleur in 1865, when he was still working in realist style, although even at this stage the painterly approach of Boudin is apparent in his brushwork.

Herman af Sillén was a Swedish sea captain who was also a fine marine painter. His Coastal Landscape with Lighthouse was most probably painted after he had attended the Academy Colarossi in Paris in 1887, and features wonderfully loose brushwork. This is one of many small lighthouses around the dissected coastline of Sweden.

Francis A Silva’s Lighthouse at Sunset (1878) is an evocative dusk coastal landscape, by this lesser-known member of the Hudson River School.

Anna Ancher’s simple plein air sketch of Moonlit Evening. Lighthouse (1904) shows what was at the time the tallest in Denmark, marking the northern tip of the peninsula of Jutland (Jylland), as it reaches up towards Norway.

Michael Zeno Diemer’s brilliant painting of The Ahırkapı Lighthouse (1906-07) shows one of the oldest tower lighthouses at one of the most notable coastal landmarks: the southern entrance to the Straits of Bosporus, near Istanbul, Turkey. This lighthouse is on the European side; its opposite number is the Kadıköy İnciburnu lighthouse to the east, which would be off the right edge of this painting. The first lighthouse constructed here was commissioned in 1755, and Diemer shows the current one, first lit in 1857.

In 1916, Renoir visited Antibes, where he painted this oil sketch of its sixteenth-century Fort Carré and Antibes Lighthouse. This isn’t the more famous tower of Garoupe Lighthouse, which is further inland, taller and elevated, but a smaller navigational mark in the harbour, and here appears almost deserted.

Paul Signac was a keen yachtsman, who most probably had first-hand knowledge of the Lighthouse at Groix (1925). This is one of a pair marking the entrance to the harbour of Port-Tudy on the Île-de-Groix, on the coast of Brittany, France. Forming an avenue in front of it are the distinctive local fishing boats which caught tuna, with their long yardarms.

Jeremy Gardiner painted this view of Summer Solstice, Lundy North Lighthouse in 2016. Lundy is a small island in the Bristol Channel, in south-west England, with two active lighthouses and a third now disused. The two active ones are at the northern and southern extremities of the island, and were both built in 1897.