The first twenty or so chapters of Miguel de Cervantes’ groundbreaking modern novel Don Quixote consist of a series of largely self-contained comic misadventures. After the knight and his long-suffering squire Sancho Panza release a group of convicts, they fear for their safety, so head for the mountains. Once there, events become more interrelated and complex, presenting even greater challenges to those who tried to paint them in standalone works, rather than illustrations accompanying the text.

The pair find a hoard of gold coins apparently abandoned with a notebook in a travel bag. Then Don Quixote catches a glimpse of a man leaping around the bushes half-naked, and suspects that he’s the owner of the bag and its coins. A little way around the hillside, they find a dead mule whose owner they think had carried that bag.

This scene must have fascinated the French artist Honoré Daumier, who painted a series of oil sketches of it in about 1867.

In the first, the knight leads his squire towards the dead mule.

This rough oil sketch shows them drawing even closer.

Sancho Panza and Don Quixote in the Sierra is more generic, and omits the dead mule altogether.

A little later, Sancho Panza’s donkey is stolen, so the knight dispatches him on his own horse Rocinante to obtain three replacement donkeys, and deliver a letter to the Lady Dulcinea, Quixote’s semi-imaginary ‘lady’ of his chivalric quests. Meanwhile, the knight laments and feigns madness for the lady. Panza meets their village priest and barber, and they agree to deceive Quixote in a bid to persuade him to return to the village for his madness to be treated.

As the three head back towards Don Quixote, they meet Dorotea, who had previously been tricked and seduced. She agrees to dress up as a fine lady and pose as Princess Micomicona, who purports to have come all the way from Guinea to ask a boon of the knight.

Pedro González Bolívar’s painting of The Introduction of Dorotea to Don Quixote from 1881 shows their meeting. Without that background information, this would prove impossible to read.

Don Quixote is persuaded to leave the mountains and return home with them, but that’s the start of another series of misadventures. During these, Dorotea’s true identity is revealed, and at dinner Don Quixote gives a long and impassioned speech in which he argues surprisingly rationally in favour of the pre-eminence of arms over learning.

This is recorded in Manuel García Hispaleto’s painting of Don Quixote’s Speech of Arms and Letters from 1884. Sancho Panza stands immediately behind the knight, at the head of the table, on the right. Seated along the table’s length are a man who has just arrived from Algiers with a Moorish woman, the village priest, and others.

Don Quixote’s madness only continues, and eventually he has to be bundled into an oxcart and taken home.

On a Sunday when all the locals are out in the square, the oxcart bearing Don Quixote enters his village at noon, as shown in Hippolyte Lecomte’s undated Don Quixote’s Homecoming. At the left, Don Quixote’s niece or housekeeper holds her hands up in horror at his condition. To the left of the cart are the priest and barber, still mounted. Sancho Panza is riding his donkey, and has been greeted by his wife and their children, who are more interested in how many fine skirts he brought back for her, and how many pairs of shoes for their children.

The priest and barber leave Don Quixote alone to recover for a month after their return, then reassess him, as shown by Miguel Jadraque in this Visit of the Priest and Barber to Don Quixote from 1880. Don Quixote is becoming animated with them as he sits up in bed. In the left background are the knight’s niece and housekeeper, praying in vain for his recovery.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza then leave on their third sally, which first takes them on a futile mission to El Toboso in quest of the Lady Dulcinea. After that, they head towards the city of Saragossa, and meet a cart full of players in costume, who create mayhem.

Carlos Vásquez Úbeda shows this encounter in his undated painting of Don Quixote. At this stage, the pair are still on their mounts, but shortly afterwards a clown causes Rocinante to bolt and throw Don Quixote, and one of the other players rides off on the squire’s donkey. For once, Sancho manages to persuade his master not to retaliate, and they continue on their way without coming to grief.

Later, they meet a group from a village, and are invited to attend a wedding there the following day.

The wedding brings an elaborate deception in which the bride’s first suitor appears to impale himself on his own sword so that he can marry the bride as his dying wish, but then miraculously comes back to life, to cheat the groom from marrying the bride as had been expected. Manuel García Hispaleto’s painting of The Marriage of Basilio and Quiteria from 1881 shows the priest officiating in the centre, as the bride to the right is married to the dying suitor, who is supported by Don Quixote with his lance. The groom stands at the front of the tent at the right, staring in disbelief at what’s going on.

The newlyweds entertain Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for three days, enabling them to visit the Cave of Montesinos and the Lakes of Ruidera nearby. Gustave Doré, whose illustrations for the whole book have been used by others as the basis for further illustrated editions, painted this non-narrative scene of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Entertained by Basil and Quiteria in about 1863.

In the middle of Cervantes’ second book of Don Quixote, the knight and his squire Sancho Panza become guests of a Duke and Duchess who had already read Cervantes’ first book, and set out to trick the pair into further comical misadventures. Soon after their arrival, the Duke’s chaplain asserts that Don Quixote isn’t a knight errant at all, causing the knight to deliver a searing riposte.

Out of the blue, maids arrive to wash and lather the knight’s beard, and that of the Duke, in a procedure that defuses a tense situation by transforming it into the absurd. Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro’s painting of Don Quijote in the Duke’s House from 1878 shows this bizarre moment, with the rotund figure of Sancho Panza at the left, the gaunt Don Quixote in the centre, and the Duke and Duchess seated at the right, in obvious amusement.

Although Cervantes had completed Don Quixote in 1615, and it quickly became popular across Europe, it appears to have been painted infrequently before the nineteenth century. Only Valero Iriarte seems to have painted its comical adventure stories in the previous century. Although Eugène Delacroix painted the non-narrative Don Quixote in his Library in 1824, Cervantes’ novel was generally ignored by the major narrative artists of the nineteenth century, who continued depicting mostly classical myth.

These paintings demonstrate how modern fiction can form the basis for successful narrative painting, even though that has remained unusual.

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.