In the first of these two articles yesterday, I showed a selection of paintings of aerial views from the early Renaissance to the middle of the nineteenth century. By the last couple of decades in that century opportunities to rise above the surface of the earth and paint there were becoming more frequent, and aerial views became more widespread. My first example, though, comes from the imagination of James Tissot.

Tissot’s What Our Lord Saw from the Cross, painted in watercolour between 1886-94, is a uniquely innovative and narrative depiction of the Crucifixion. This was one of his 365 illustrations for new printed editions of the Bible.

Carlos Schwabe’s Evening Bells, another watercolour this time from 1891, is an unusual composite of three different views: dominating the right and lower areas is a view of a belltower and roof, with a rhythmic series of angels emerging from one of the windows and flying downwards. At the lower left is an aerial view of a contemporary French town, and at the upper left a coastal view with water lapping on a flat shore.

The following year, Hans Thoma completed his fascinating Wondrous Birds, not showing storks or cranes as you might expect, but grey herons. These are a common sight across much of the countryside of Europe, but don’t seem to be associated with as many myths and legends as storks or cranes. It’s only in recent years that specialist wildlife photographers have been able to fly with the birds in the way that Thoma imagined.

Isaac Levitan considered Above Eternal Rest (1893-4) to be his finest painting, and it makes interesting comparison to landscape views of the Low Countries in Europe. A convincingly real appearance conceals greater artifice: it’s a composite idealised landscape assembled from studies that he made in 1888 of the sixteenth century wooden church of St Peter and St Paul, built on a hill above the town of Plyos on the Volga. The church’s tiny lit window is dwarfed against the expanse of swollen river, and the distant flat wilderness receding deep to a featureless horizon.

Viktor Zarubin’s Cloud Shadows from about 1907 is an unusual aerial view of patches of fields lit in bright sunlight. Prominent among them is one containing a small flock of sheep and two shepherds.

By this time, Camille Pissarro’s eye problems had forced him to take up painting cityscapes from hotel windows.

His late series of Paris, including Boulevard Montmartre, Spring Morning from 1897, were painted over successive days to enable him to capture their full detail.

On the opposite shore of the Atlantic, New York City was starting to bristle with skyscrapers, which formed the basis and vantage points for many of Colin Campbell Cooper’s cityscapes.

Cooper’s Flatiron Building, Manhattan (c 1908) is an important painting in many ways. It was one of the few he made using casein paints, which had recently come into vogue. More characteristic of illustrations than fine art, Cooper shows how versatile these paints are in skilled hands.

This was painted just a few years after this distinctive landmark at 175 Fifth Avenue had been completed (1902). Then one of the tallest buildings in New York City, at 20 floors high, its triangular section makes it instantly recognisable. It was originally named the Fuller Building, after George A Fuller, the ‘father of the skyscraper’, but quickly gained its more popular title. It was equally quickly photographed in classic images by Alfred Stieglitz (1903) and Edward Steichen (1904), but Cooper’s composition, with its bustle of people, carriages, and aerial wisps of steam, makes his view one of the most impressive.

The next major change came with aviation during the First World War.

Eric Walter Powell’s view of BE2C Aeroplanes over the Somme from 1916 is one of the first paintings to show the world from above the clouds. Although people had become used to aerial views from mountains, when the first aerial photographs were made in about 1885, they showed the earth in a completely novel way. Powell shows this unfamiliar landscape/cloudscape with its oblique view of the ground below, and the scattered small cumulus clouds of a fine day.

Grant Wood frequently used elevated viewpoints for his distinctive paintings of the rural American Midwest.

His Midnight Ride of Paul Revere from 1931 was inspired by Longfellow’s poem Paul Revere’s Ride (1860), telling the story of the American patriot Paul Revere (1735-1818) and his midnight ride on 18 April 1775, to alert colonial militia of the approach of British forces before the battles of Lexington and Concord. Here he uses a bird’s eye view to give it an air of unreality.

The sky assumed even greater importance for some painters in the middle of the twentieth century, among them the Surrealist Paul Nash, whose wartime experiences gave it a more sinister significance. It had become the place of aerial warfare, and most of all the source of ‘white flowers’, parachutists, “that dreadful miracle of the sky blossoming with these floating flowers.”

In just a few centuries, paintings of aerial views had gone from World Views of major land battles, through the crowds of bustling cities, to the carnage of the Second World War.