After yesterday’s accounts of the extraordinary weddings in myth and other narrative, in this article I consider a small selection of depictions of more normal wedding celebrations, from the personal and tender to some amid spectacular scenery.

When Peter Paul Rubens married for the first time, to Isabella Brant in the autumn of 1609, he painted this touching celebration, the Honeysuckle Bower, the closest that he could come to the modern wedding photo of bride and groom. Honeysuckle was a well known symbol for faithfulness, and hands laid over one another (“dextrarum iunctio”) have symbolized matrimony since ancient times. Tragically, their bliss was to be short-lived, as Isabella was to die of the plague in 1626 when she was only thirty-four.

Antoine Watteau’s first masterpiece, Marriage Contract and Country Dancing from about 1711, combines three stages of a wedding in a single image, as if in multiplex narrative. In the distance at the far left is the tower of the church where the priest brought the couple together in union in front of God. In the centre, they sign their contract of marriage, while around them is the country dancing of the secular celebration.

Eugène Delacroix started painting his Jewish Wedding in Morocco in 1837, apparently as a commission, and completed it in time for the 1841 Salon. The viewer is given the opportunity to see one of the women dancing in honour of the bride, in a ceremony clearly intended to be very private.

Weddings in the villages around the fjords of the far south-west of Norway, to the east of Bergen, were very special events. To show this, Hans Gude joined forces with Adolph Tidemand in this marvellous painting of Bridal Journey in Hardanger in 1848. Tidemand’s figures are seamlessly integrated into Gude’s majestic landscape.

Weddings continued through winter in the Carpathian Mountains, in modern Ukraine. Kazimierz Sichulski’s Hutsul Wedding from 1909 shows a wedding party in traditional dress making their way through the snow.

Royal weddings merited pageantry of a different form, as shown in William Frith’s painting of the Marriage of the Prince of Wales, 10 March 1863 completed in 1865. This took place under the watchful eye of the groom’s mother, Queen Victoria (on the balcony at the upper right), who seems to be attracting as much attention as the wedding in progress below her. The groom was to become King Edward VII on the death of the Queen; his bride was Alexandra of Denmark, who was only eighteen at the time. The ceremony took place in Saint George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. By this time, Victoria’s husband Prince Albert had died and she had effectively withdrawn from public life.

Marià Fortuny, whose interest in ceremony and costume has led to him being dubbed a Costumbrist, painted this intricately detailed view of The Spanish Wedding in 1870. The scene is the interior of a sacristy, where a wedding party is going through the administrative procedures of the ceremony. The groom is bent over a table, signing a document, while the bride behind him (holding a fan) is talking to her mother.

The rest of the wedding party waits patiently, but a woman at the back of the small group turns towards a penitent, who stands to the right of the group. He carries an effigy of the soul burning in flames. The wedding party, and a group seated at the right, are shown in richly-patterned dress, as if attending a masked ball. Their detail contrasts with the more painterly rendering of the surroundings.

In the late nineteenth century weddings changed forever, when they became the preserve of the photographer.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s A Wedding at the Photographer’s (1879) comes close to a photographic realism throughout the image. He was calculating in his choice of motif: the wedding market wasn’t one that could be catered for by painters, at least not in the way that photographers were starting to capitalise on it. The image gives the appearance of veracity, and uses subtle signs to make photography appear cheap and nasty compared with painting. There is an irony in this painting too, in that Dagnan-Bouveret was one of the first painters to incorporate photography into his working methods, later using it in conjunction with more traditional sketches and studies when preparing major works.

A year or two later, Dagnan-Bouveret revisited the wedding theme without the aid of a photographer, in his Blessing of the Young Couple Before Marriage (1880-81). This traditional subject is lit by brilliant sunshine from the right, which almost makes the bride’s dress appear to be on fire.

By coincidence, William Frith also returned to the theme at the same time, in For Better, For Worse from 1881. This is one of his Hogarthian paintings, most definitely not by Royal command, and passing comment on contemporary society with its glaring inequalities. He contrasts an affluent couple departing for their honeymoon in a hansom cab, with a poor couple and their two children watching at the lower left, a theme that I’m sure the author Charles Dickens would have appreciated had he not died a decade earlier.

My final nineteenth century wedding painting is by another Naturalist, Jean-Eugène Buland, although here being more than a little sentimental and romantic, even populist. His idyllic Innocent Wedding from 1884 shows a young couple strolling arm in arm through blossom with their home village in the distance.

As lawyers rose to prominence in life during the nineteenth century, two artists in particular targeted them with their scathing satire: Honoré Daumier and Jean-Louis Forain.

For the satirical eye of Honoré Daumier, Three Lawyers (1855-57) meeting was the gathering of an elite who were out to help themselves, rather than the unfortunate people they purported to represent. Their heads tipped back and clutching thick bundles of papers, Daumier had less respect of them than they had for themselves.

In his undated Two Lawyers Conversing, you can be sure that they’re up to no good, except for themselves.

Jean-Louis Forain was a successful painter, caricaturist and political satirist in the late nineteenth century, who had long admired Daumier’s work. When Forain turned his attention to justice and the law after about 1902, he went beyond Daumier’s biting images of lawyers by entering the courtroom itself.

Forain’s The Court from about 1902-03 is one of the first of his series of courtroom views, and most neutral in its approach. In the foreground, a lawyer discusses the case with a woman, who is bent forward to hear his whispering. In the distance the court appears detached, perhaps disinterested, the judges sat behind large piles of papers, under a large painting of the crucifixion. The artist sold this work to Edgar Degas.

By the time that Forain painted this Trial Scene from 1904, his satire had come to the surface. The court here is so completely disinterested in the case before it that its judge is incapable of remaining awake, and the jurors at the left are hardly attentive either.

A young woman stands out in Forain’s Scene at the Tribunal (1906), as a lawyer turns and scowls disapprovingly at her.

Two women are shown in his Scene of the Tribunal from 1910, a lawyer talking to them as the court appears oblivious to their presence.

Legal Assistance (c 1900-12) shows an ordinary family man, cradling his young child in his arms as he presents a paper to a barrister or judge (wearing his short cylindrical hat). This painting was bought by Henri Rouart, an industrialist who was a good patron of the arts, as well as a fine amateur painter himself.

Sadly only available in this monochrome image, Forain’s undated painting of Recess of the Court is his most scathing. The judge leans back, fast asleep, as chaos takes hold in the court. Laywers are talking among themselves, and furniture is being moved around. Where is justice?

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that a growing interest in contemporary courts, and well-publicised trials, made them more popular in paintings. As few people ever see the inside of a courtroom, one of the first tasks of artists was to reveal what they looked like.

Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin’s painting of The Old Bailey, Known Also as the Central Criminal Court from 1808, here seen in an aquatint, is a good topographic view of this most famous English court. The presiding judge sits under a Damoclean sword of justice at the left, and the twelve men of the jury are to the right of centre. At the far right stands the accused, in front of whom is a large collection of witnesses ready to testify.

That was, and remains, an exceptional court. More typical of the type of court that ordinary citizens might encounter is Adolph Tidemand’s Scene before a Magistrate in the Country (before 1858), seen here in a lithograph. Set somewhere in rural Norway, the bench of magistrates sits at the right in more cramped and modest surroundings. Its justice may have been rougher, but the experience was far less daunting, and less overwhelmed by lawyers.

Ferdinand Brütt’s Before the Judges from 1903 shows the end of an era in the courtroom, as an official lights the candles in its chandelier, and its three judges sit hearing the case being put to them.