Balconies have been a significant device in painting, and in this and tomorrow’s articles I look at two groups of views using them with effect. This article looks from outside the balcony towards it, and the interior behind; tomorrow I’ll reverse that and look from balconies, typically from inside looking out at the world beyond.

These balconies are mostly platforms projecting from the upper part of a building, above ground level, normally capable of containing people, and constraining them from falling by a surrounding balustrade. They were popular features of some of the most ancient buildings in Europe, and much loved by classical civilisations.

For the visual artist they offer several opportunities, from their height above the ground affording good views or giving vertical extent, for the relationships between people on the balcony and those below, and most interestingly for their extension to the interior of a building into the exterior. Suspended in mid-air, they’re simultaneously both inside and outside, but neither.

Balconies play a significant role in several well-painted narratives, including that of David and Bathsheba, here in Jan Matsys’ painting of 1562. The action is taking place at ground level, where one of King David’s court has been sent down to express regal interest in the scantily-clad Bathsheba, to the wicked amusement of her maid. King David himself is leaning over the balustrade in the distance, elevated as his position demands, and looking down at us.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s much later Bathsheba from 1889 may have been painted three centuries later, but bears striking compositional similarities.

Another well-known story in which a balcony plays a key role is the love of Romeo and Juliet, as told in Shakespeare’s play, in which Act 3, scene 5 is known as the Balcony Scene. Richard Dadd’s version, in his watercolour Sketch for the Passions: Love from 1853, shows Romeo ascended and about to kiss Juliet, as a rather ugly nurse behind them looks away anxiously.

Ford Madox Brown’s interpretation from 1869-70 makes this even more vertiginous, with the couple alone and squeezed into a balcony smaller than a single bed. We ascend to the heights of love, and of ecstasy.

Balconies proved popular among those allied with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, such as Philip Hermogenes Calderon, who in his Home After Victory from 1867 uses one to lend a more courtly mediaeval air to this scene of rejoicing.

Balconies even appear in pioneer landscape painting. Possibly the smallest major painting of a balcony is that in Thomas Jones’s early plein air oil painting of A Wall in Naples, made on paper in about 1782. Not only is this painting tiny, little more than 10 x 15 cm (4 x 6 inches), but the balcony is so small that it’s really only good for hanging out the washing.

Another landmark painting of a balcony, Francisco Goya’s Majas on a Balcony, made between 1800-12, is unusual for ignoring almost all its compositional properties. These two young women are at much the same height as the viewer, and there’s no clear inside or out, just a couple of shady guys skulking behind them, and the black iron balustrade fencing them in. Majas were lower-class women in Spain, particularly its capital Madrid, who dressed in elaborate local style, here in florid mantillas, for example.

Goya apparently inspired Édouard Manet to paint The Balcony in 1868-69. Its four figures are Berthe Morisot (seated, left) who later became Manet’s sister-in-law, the painter Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, Fanny Claus (standing, right, with umbrella) a violinist, and in the shadows behind Léon Leenhoff, Manet’s son. As with the painting that inspired it, this all but ignores the visual potential of the balcony.

Shortly after Manet had exhibited that to derision at the Salon, the young American Impressionist-to-be Mary Cassatt visited Spain, where she painted her more conventional take, The Flirtation – A Balcony in Seville (1872). Romeo and Juliet have been revisited, without a maja’s mantilla in sight.

It took the Valencian painter José Benlliure a trip to Italy to find his balcony, in The Carnival in Rome (1881), and exploit its potential more fully. Festooned with flowers and richly-decorated carpets, this balcony has become the carnival in miniature, its occupants dressed for the occasion. Even a pair of pigeons are joining in the revelry.

Balconies have also been places for more formal ceremonial, such as Papal and royal addresses. Jean-Jacques Scherrer uses this allusion for Charlotte Corday in Caen from 1894. It was Corday who assassinated the revolutionary Marat in his bath. Here Scherrer imagines her as heroine, greeting crowds of supporters beneath her balcony.

Around the end of the nineteenth century, the viewer became one of the riff-raff below the balcony of those richer and more famous. George Clairin’s undated Spanish Woman on Balcony looks down at us with disdain from lavish potted flowers.

In Clairin’s On the Balcony, from around 1910, we aren’t even close to those already halfway to heaven behind their ornate art nouveau balustrade.

Pierre Bonnard’s painting of the Blue Balcony from 1910 doesn’t reveal how important balconies became to him. But in each of two homes that he made with his lifelong partner (and later wife) Marthe, seen here on the balcony of the title, Bonnard had extensive balconies added.

Harvested cereal needs to be separated into grain, stems of straw, and miscellaneous fragments such as husk known as chaff. Of these, the grain is the most valuable as it will be ground into flour, a process shown in the next article in this series. Long straw was also a valuable commodity, as it was used extensively for thatching, while the chaff was usually discarded. Separating grain and chaff from straw was accomplished by threshing, one of the first processes in arable farming to be mechanised, while removing the chaff is referred to as winnowing.

In ancient civilisations, threshing was performed by striking the cut crop using flails, as show in this marginal drawing in the Luttrell Psalter from the east of England. This is thought to have been made in about 1325-35, when this tiring and inefficient method was still widespread.

In ancient Egypt, oxen were used, first to trample the grain with their hooves and later to draw a heavy rotating sledge or roller over the cut crop. This was usually performed on a flat and elevated area, where the wind could blow away much of the generated chaff.

Goya’s greatest achievement in his series showing the seasons, and probably the finest of all his cartoons, is that for summer, seen here in his sketch of The Threshing Floor from 1786. Although the huge finished version is more finely detailed, his brushwork there is also surprisingly loose. Two horses used to tow the heavy roller at the far left are here seen at rest, as the labourers relax. They’re holding pitchforks, used to load the threshing floor with cut cereal and gather the straw when the load has been threshed.

In PS Krøyer’s Threshing in the Abruzzi from 1890, a century later, teams of oxen are trampling the crop to thresh it.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Grain Threshers, Egypt (1859) shows this as one of the more traditional employments for animals, who are drawing a threshing sledge.

While much of the work of harvest remained intensely and exhaustively manual, some processes like the separation of grain seeds from inedible straw proved amenable to mechanisation.

In Franz Niklaus König’s Farmers, around the House;, or Farmer Family in the Barn from 1798, one of the early hand-cranked threshing machines is shown on the right, as the farmer is winnowing clouds of chaff from the grain it produced. Most barns were built with large openings at each end, to allow natural breezes to blow the chaff away and leave the denser grain in the large, shallow wickerwork trays used for winnowing.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animals and other sources of power were being used, as shown in Albert Rigolot’s painting of The Threshing Machine, Loiret from 1893, with a detail below. One of the early uses for steam engines was to power similar machines. The next step was to make those engines mobile under their own power, as traction engines.

Jean-François Millet’s portrait of Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 shows her holding a traditional winnow in her left hand.

Storage was a major consideration, too. Although threshed grain generally keeps well, it’s prone to rodents and must be kept dry. A traditional solution was to build the sheaves of cut cereal into grainstacks, then protect them with a covering of thatch. These are different from the stacks of hay also common in the countryside, and played a major role in Impressionism.

Claude Monet first painted a series of canvases depicting grainstacks at Giverny, literally outside his back yard, in 1889. In the early autumn of 1890, Monet started a fresh series consisting of two grainstacks, now accorded Wildenstein numbers of W1266 to W1279. During that winter, the farmer was able to start threshing, and one of the grainstacks was consumed.

Apparently Monet paid the farmer to retain the single remaining grainstack so he could continue the series, allowing him to paint W1280 to W1290, each showing that single grainstack. After various delays during which Monet apparently made further adjustments to the paintings in the series, the first fifteen canvases were shown at an exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris, which opened on 4 May 1891. They all sold, for sums of up to 1,000 francs, and provided Monet with an excellent return for his winter’s work.

Looking at Grainstacks, End of Summer, considered to be one of the earliest in the series and numbered 1266, the trees behind the two grainstacks are still in full summer leaf, with no indication of the advent of autumn. Yet Monet’s signature gives the year as 1891. Looking at its paint surface in detail, some has been applied wet-in-wet and blended with underlying and adjacent paint, but many other brushstrokes have clearly been applied over dry underlayers.

Grainstack, Sun in the Mist, numbered 1286, is thought to be one of the later paintings in the series, apparently showing the sole remaining grainstack in the Spring of 1891. It too has multiple layers applied wet-on-dry, with many hatched brushstrokes in shades of orange and pink apparently applied over a well-dried surface. Below is a summary of the whole series.

Among the great dangers to grainstacks was fire.

Jules Breton’s The Burning Haystack from 1856 is mistitled, as it in fact shows a grainstack, as seen in the sheaves being removed from it in haste. The panic-stricken villagers must work quickly if they are to save a substantial part of their grain store for the coming winter.

Granaries incorporated an ingenious solution to exclude rats and mice: they were constructed on a support of staddlestones, each a pair of stones fashioned into the form of a mushroom. These are now commonly seen in the country, where they’re used to prevent drivers from running their vehicles over grass borders outside properties. Rats and mice are happy to climb vertical surfaces, but can’t cope with the overhang of the cap of a staddlestone, an ancient solution to the problem.

In the first article of these two considering voyeurism in paintings, I examined classical examples from myth and the popular Biblical stories of King David and Bathsheba, and Susanna and the Elders.

According to legend, King Candaules of Lydia boasted of the beauty of his wife, Nyssia, to the chief of his personal guard, Gyges. To support his boast, the king showed his wife to Gyges by stealth, naked as she was preparing for bed. When she discovered Gyges’ voyeurism, Nyssia gave him the choice of being executed or of murdering the king. Opting for the latter, Gyges stabbed the king to death when he was in bed, then married Nyssia and succeeded Candaules on the throne.

Jean-Léon Gérôme in his early King Candaules from 1859 chose to show the moment that Nyssia removed the last item of her clothing, prior to the moment of peripeteia. The king is in his bed, awaiting his wife, who has just removed the last of her clothing as she spots the dark and hooded figure of Gyges watching her from the open door. Gérôme’s love of detail in the decor saves this from the accusation that this was just another excuse for a full-length nude.

Two years later, Gérôme looked again at this theme.

Phryne was a highly successful and rich courtesan (hetaira) in ancient Greece who, according to legend, was brought to trial for the serious crime of impiety. When it seemed inevitable that she would be found guilty, one of her lovers, the orator Hypereides, took on her defence. A key part of that was to unveil her naked in front of the court, in an attempt to surprise its members, impress them with the beauty of her body, and arouse a sense of pity. The legend claims that this ploy worked perfectly.

Phryne is to the left of centre, in the midst of the semicircular court, completely naked apart from some jewellery on her neck and wrists, and her sandals. She is turned away from the gaze of the judges, her eyes hidden in the crook of her right elbow, as if in shame and modesty. Behind her (to the left), her defence has just removed her blue robes with a flourish, his hands holding them high. At Phryne’s feet is a gold belt of a kind worn to designate courtesans in France from the thirteenth century, with the Greek word ΚΑΛΗ (kale), meaning beautiful.

The judges, all men with bare chests and wearing uniform scarlet robes, are taken aback. Gérôme shows a whole textbook of responses from pure fright, to anguish, grief, or disbelief, with each of those men looking straight at Phryne.

Superficially, it’s easy to suggest that Gérôme was using Phryne’s nakedness to appeal to the lowest desires, which remained one of the popular attractions of the annual Salon. However it’s more likely that this is a statement about attitudes to the nude female form, the judgement of the Salon, voyeurism and looking.

In his Musidora And Her Two Companions, Sacharissa And Amoret from 1795, Benjamin West turns to a now-forgotten cycle of poems by James Thomson, The Seasons, published between 1726-30. In this scene from Summer, Damon, who is peeping from behind a tree at the far left, voyeuristically watches the three young women bathing in a stream. He’s in love with Musidora, and towards dusk on a summer’s day is sat in a hazel copse, lost in thought. She, with her two friends, then comes to bathe in the nearby stream, and he watches them undress, forming a “soul-distracting view”. He finally can’t stand the sight any more, writes Musidora a note revealing that he had been watching her, then rushes away. She discovers his note, recognises his writing, and responds with mixed emotions.

Eugène Delacroix’s painting of Louis d’Orléans Showing his Mistress from 1825-26 tells a sordid story of misogyny from French history. Set in about 1400, it shows Louis I, Duke of Orléans, brother of King Charles VI, at the right, displaying the legs and lower body of his mistress, Mariette d’Enghien, to his chamberlain. Her face is obscured because the mistress also happens to be the chamberlain’s wife.

Marià Fortuny pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in art in his portrait of Carmen Bastián (1871-72). His model here is a young gypsy woman whom he ‘discovered’ in the Barranco de la Zorra, then a desolate area towards Granada’s main cemetery, in Spain. When posing for the painter on his ancient sofa, she provocatively lifted her skirt to taunt him, and make the artist and viewers voyeurs.

Nude on the Beach at Portici (1874) is an excellent example of the balance that Fortuny struck between its vigorously scrubbed-in background, giving a textural feel to the beach, and the virtuoso brushwork he used to render the woman’s body. Its high angle of view and her pose makes this decidedly voyeuristic.

The most prolonged, even exhaustive, period of voyeurism must be in the intimate domestic scenes Pierre Bonnard painted of his longstanding partner Marthe, from 1898 to her death in 1942. Of the thousands of paintings and photographs that he made of her, I have selected just two.

In 1898, Bonnard painted the first of his controversial works revealing his private life with Marthe, in Man and Woman in an Interior (1898), a motif known better from his later version of 1900. He stands naked, looking away, as Marthe is getting dressed on the bed. Its post-coital implications are clear. The image has also been cropped unusually, as if it was a ‘candid’ photo, enhancing its voyeuristic appearance.

Bonnard’s best-known nudes of 1925 are those in which his model is still in the bath, most notably Nude in the Bath. The bath is cropped to show just the lower torso and legs of the woman in its water. A second, clothed, person is striding across from the left, its figure cropped extremely to show just the front of the body and legs.

It is thought that the figure on the left is that of the artist, but I cannot make sense of that. He or she appears to be wearing light patterned clothing consisting of a jacket and long skirt, with soft slippers resembling ballet shoes!

I hope that you’re now feeling thoroughly uncomfortable in looking at all these paintings.

As a visual art, painting is all about looking and seeing, and one of its more discomforting themes is that of the voyeur, the eyes that shouldn’t be there, looking at something they really shouldn’t. In these two articles, I first show examples of paintings that explore this in classical myths and Biblical stories, then tomorrow will take that on to more modern subjects.

When Acis, son of the river nymph Symaethis, was only sixteen, Galatea fell in love with him, but the Cyclops Polyphemus fell in love with her. The latter did his best to smarten his appearance for her, but remained deeply and murderously jealous of Acis. Telemus, a seer, visited Sicily and warned Polyphemus that Ulysses would blind his single eye. This upset the Cyclops, who climbed a coastal hill and sat there, playing his reed pipes.

Meanwhile, Galatea was lying in the arms of her lover Acis, hidden behind a rock on the beach. Polyphemus then launched into a long soliloquy imploring Galatea to come to him and spurn Acis. When he saw the two lovers together, Polyphemus grew angry, and shouted loudly at them that would be their last embrace. Galatea dived into the sea, but her lover was crushed to death by the boulder that Polyphemus lobbed at him.

Gustave Moreau’s Galatea from about 1880 shows her resting naked in the countryside with her eyes closed, and the cyclops playing sinister voyeur. Surrounding them is a magical countryside, filled with strange plants recalling anemones, as would be appropriate to a sea-nymph. Polyphemus is shown with two ‘normal’ eyesockets and lids, his single seeing eye staring out disconcertingly from the middle of his forehead.

Odilon Redon’s The Cyclops (c 1914) is one of the masterpieces of Symbolism, and follows Redon’s personal theme of the eye and sight, and further develops that of the voyeurism of Polyphemus. Polyphemus’ face is now dominated by his single eye looking down over Galatea’s naked beauty, with Acis nowhere to be seen.

Van der Werff’s modern reputation includes painting the erotic, and his Amorous Couple in a Park Spied upon by Children, or Paris and Oenone, from 1694, is one of his earlier works exploring the intense relationship of this legendary couple. When he was still a shepherd, Paris of Troy married the nymph Oenone, whom he later abandoned to marry Helen.

The Biblical story of King David and Bathsheba is all about voyeurism and sinister power.

Miniatures, such as Jean Bourdichon’s Bathsheba Bathing from 1498-99, led more private lives and could be considerably more explicit. Here is the most frequently painted moment of the story, with a nude Bathsheba bathing in the foreground, and David in his crown and regal robes watching her from a window in the distance.

In 1714, Adriaen van der Werff painted his traditional version of Bathsheba, who is combing her hair under the distant gaze of King David.

The Scottish artist David Wilkie’s Bathsheba from 1815 is set in the countryside. She is now beside a small stream where she has been bathing, and is just donning a stocking. King David is again shown as a sinister voyeur.

As you might expect, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Bathsheba (1889) is a literal interpretation of the story. Watching Bathsheba washing in her small roof-garden is the figure of David, leaning forward to get as close a look as he can.

The other related Biblical narrative is that of Susanna and the elders, which opens with the two men watching her bathing in the privacy of her own garden.

In Jacopo Tintoretto’s groundbreaking masterpiece, Susanna is blissfully unaware of being watched by the evil elders. This puts the viewer in the uncomfortable predicament of knowing what’s going on, but also knowing what she doesn’t know.

Susanna herself is caught as she is drying her leg after bathing in the small pool beside her, looking at herself in a rectangular mirror propped up against a rosy trellis in a secluded part of her garden. Scattered in front of her are the tools of grooming, her personal jewellery, and a fine gold-encrusted girdle, behind which appear to be her outer garments.

Peering round each end of the trellis are the two old elders dressed in orange robes, who have entered the garden and crept right up to get a better view of Susanna’s body. To the right are trees, against whose foot Susanna’s back rests. Immediately above her head is a magpie, a bird associated in fables with mischief and theft. In the centre distance, the secluded area opens out to another pond, on which there are ducks and their ducklings, then there is a covered walk beside which is a Herm. In the left distance is a larger pond, at which a stag and a hind are drinking. On the far side are some trees and another Herm.

Unlike other paintings of nudes, where mirrors are often used to extend the view of the figure on display, neither the image seen in the mirror nor the reflection on the water show anything more of Susanna.

Lovis Corinth started painting this story in 1890, when he made two slightly different versions of what was fundamentally the same work. Their only reference to the garden is now a single rose, the flower chosen by Tintoretto for the trellis in front of Susanna, on the floor. The two elders have followed Susanna back inside after her bathing, and are now spying on her from behind a curtain, where only one of them is prominent. In common with Tintoretto, Corinth chooses a moment before Susanna is aware that she is being watched, and long before the elders force themselves on her. Both paintings emphasise her nakedness by including her clothes, and add the jewellery of more traditional depictions.

Depictions of courts of law aren’t common, and fall into five main groups: those showing cases and events from legend and history, modern documentary records of trials, others purely fictional, some satirical accounts, and a few general views without narrative. This article covers the first three, leaving satire and general views to come tomorrow.

The first is an account of a corrupt judge in the Achaemenid Empire around 525 BCE, and the extreme penalty he paid.

The story given by Herodotus about the corruption of Sisamnes, known as the Judgement of Cambyses, is today obscure. However, in 1489 it formed the basis for two paintings by Gerard David now viewed as forming a diptych. Sisamnes was a notoriously corrupt judge under the rule of King Cambyses II of Persia, and accepted a bribe in return for delivering an unjust verdict.

In the left panel, Sisamnes is being arrested by the king and his men, as the judge sits in his official chair. Hand gestures indicate the bribery that had been at the root of Sisamnes’ crime.

King Cambyses sentences Sisamnes to be flayed alive, as shown in the foreground of the right panel. In the upper right, David uses multiplex narrative to show the judge’s skin then covering the official chair, as a reminder to all who sit in judgement of the fate that awaits them should they ever become corrupt or unfair.

David’s gruesome pair of paintings were a pointed reminder to the authorities in Bruges of the importance of an independent judiciary, and the penalty for any judge who was tempted by bribery or any other form of influence, cautions with contemporary value even now.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Phryne before the Areopagus from 1861 harks back to a classical legend of an unusual court case in Athens. Phryne had been a highly successful and very rich courtesan (hetaira) in ancient Greece, who was brought to trial for the serious crime of impiety. When it seemed inevitable that she would be found guilty, one of her lovers, the orator Hypereides, took on her defence. A key part of that was to unveil her naked in front of the court, in an attempt to surprise its members, impress them with the beauty of her body, and arouse a sense of pity. The legend claims that this ploy worked perfectly.

Gérôme shows a whole textbook of responses to surprise among the members of the court, although Phryne herself is covering not her body, but her eyes; each of the men in the court, of course, is looking straight at her. At the time that Gérôme painted this, France was well into its Second Empire, when Napoleon III had removed the gag from the French press, and was moving from his early authoritarian regime towards the more liberal. The legend of Phryne was a convenient vehicle for Gérôme to express his political opinion, and her nakedness suggests her role is that of Truth.

The other much better-known story of judgement is that of King Solomon, told in the Old Testament, and in a succession of marvellous paintings since the Renaissance. Two women each claimed to be the mother of the same healthy baby, alleging that the other was the mother of a dead child. Solomon’s wise judgement was to threaten to cut the living baby in two, which elicited the correct protective response from the real mother of that child.

Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting of 1649 uses a classical composition, the two disputing women and their actions preventing it from becoming too symmetrical. Timed slightly before the raising of the sword, the master of painted narrative depicts the body language with great clarity. Solomon’s hands indicate his role as the arbiter, in showing a fair balance between the two sides.

The true mother, on the left, holds her left hand up to tell the soldier to stop following the King’s instructions and spare the infant. Her right hand is extended towards the false mother, indicating that she has asked for the baby to go to her rather than die. The false mother points accusingly at the child, her expression full of hatred. Hands are also raised in the group at the right, perhaps indicating their reactions to Solomon’s judgement.

Coverage of prominent court cases came to dominate reporting in the press throughout Europe and North America. Several cases became so popular that they moved artists to depict them, and one, the Dreyfus Affair in France, had lasting influence on that nation’s history.

Frederick Sargent’s painting of The Tichborne Trial (1873-1899) shows one of the most prominent cases in England. In 1854, Roger Tichborne, heir to a title and family riches, was presumed to have died in a shipwreck. The following year, an Australian butcher came forward with the claim that he was that heir, which was tested in a civil court case, heard between 1871-72.

The outcome of that rejected the claim, and the Australian butcher then underwent criminal prosecution for perjury, in one of the longest criminal cases heard in an English court, during 188 days between 1872-73. Sargent’s painting shows that case in progress, with the accused sitting just below the centre and looking straight ahead of him. Standing to the right of him is his barrister, Edward Kenealy, with ‘mutton chop’ whiskers.

The Australian butcher was convicted, sentenced to fourteen years in prison, and eventually died destitute in 1898. His barrister’s career was also finished, and he was subsequently disbarred. He went on to be elected as a Member of Parliament for his own political party in 1875, but died shortly after losing that seat in 1880.

Courts in some jurisdictions have long been reticent about allowing parties, judges, or juries to be drawn, painted or photographed. Although American practice has long allowed artists as reporters, in 1925 Britain made it illegal to draw inside a courtroom during a trial. The thirst for images for publication has since been satisfied by artists who work entirely from memory.

Arnold Mesches’ Courtroom sketch of the US Navy’s court of inquiry about USS Pueblo’s capture by North Korea from 1969 is perhaps more of an illustrative record of a court in session, sketched from a square and conventional position. But other artists and cases are quite different.

Robert Clark Templeton’s Drawing for CBS Evening News of Bobby G. Seale and others (1971) shows the head and shoulders of the accused, who co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and was here on trial in New Haven, CT, for the murder of Alex Rackley. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and the case was declared a mistrial.

Another fine example of courtroom art is Elizabeth Williams’ portrait of Faisal Shahzad, The “Times Square Bomber” Sentencing, Manhattan Federal Court: October 5, 2010 (2010). Shahzad had pleaded guilty to five counts of federal terrorism-related crimes committed when he planted a car bomb in Times Square, New York, on 5 May 2010, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

There have also been a few paintings of fictional trials.

Abraham Solomon’s wonderful pair of paintings is set immediately outside a court. In the first, the father and family of the accused are seen Waiting for the Verdict (1859) at the end of a trial. The court appears in cameo up to the right, in that strange state of suspended animation as it awaits the decision.

Solomon’s pendant shows the elation when the verdict of Not Guilty (1859) is returned. The man, now freed from the dock, is embraced by his wife, who is kneeling in supplication, as their young child reaches out to touch father’s face. His father, eyes damp with tears of relief, is thanking their barrister earnestly.

In place of the view of the distant court, which is being symbolically dismissed as the barrister closes a door at the right edge, the left side of the painting now leads out to the warm light of the early dusk in the outside world, indicating freedom.

The melodrama of legal process is shown in William Frederick Yeames’ ‘problem picture’ Defendant and Counsel from 1895. An affluent married woman wearing an expensive fur coat sits with a popular newspaper open in front of her, as a team of three barristers and their clerk look at her intensely, presumably waiting for her to speak. As we’re told that she is the defendant, the viewer is encouraged to speculate what she is defending: a divorce claim, or a criminal charge?

Camels have continued to feature in paintings showing more recent times, from events at the end of the eighteenth century, when Napoleon was in Egypt.

Jean-Léon Gérôme made several paintings showing Napoleon in Egypt, including this highly detailed and intricate version of General Bonaparte and his Staff in Egypt from 1867. The French Campaign in Egypt and Syria had been in 1798-1801, so this was still relatively recent history, even when viewed from the distance of the final years of the Second Empire.

Dromedaries were introduced to Australia in the nineteenth century to carry people and loads through its arid regions. They came to prominence in the ill-fated Burke and Wills Expedition of 1860 to cross the continent of Australia from south (Melbourne) to north in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Nicholas Chevalier painted this Memorandum of the Start of the Exploring Expedition to mark the occasion in 1860. The team left Royal Park, Melbourne on the afternoon of 20 August 1860 with nineteen men and about twenty tonnes of equipment and stores. Included were more than twenty-four camels, horses and wagons. Only one of the team survived to complete the crossing, and seven died, including both Burke and Wills.

David Roberts’ painting of the Isle of Graia, Gulf of Akabah (1839), shown here as a lithograph, is unusual for showing camels on the beach. We’re used to seeing dogs, horses, donkeys, even cows and sheep, but the ‘ship of the desert’ isn’t a common sight on the beach. The coastline of the Gulf of Aqaba (or Gulf of Eilat) is on the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula, and before urbanisation, development, and the advent of tourists, had a wild desert beauty, as shown here.

As artists visited North Africa more during the latter half of the nineteenth century, paintings of camels in their natural habitat became more common.

Marià Fortuny’s Camels Reposing, Tangiers (1865) is a watercolour sketch made over a heavily-worked and now visible graphite drawing, showing a group of camels resting near the city of Tangier, not far from Tétouan, in northern Morocco.

Alberto Pasini’s painting of The Caravan of the Shah of Persia from 1867 is a superbly wide view of an extensive royal caravan crossing a desert plain, including a couple of elephants at the right.

When Ivan Aivazovsky visited Tiflis, now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia in 1868, his superb painting of this cosmopolitan city shows camels on its bustling streets.

Even in 1900-18, when Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani painted this Tatar Camel Driver, they would still have been a common sight in parts of Tbilisi visited by traders from the south, and the artist was clearly familiar with the animal. Tatar traders moved their goods on Bactrian camels as far as Crimea and other parts of southern Ukraine.

Eugen Bracht’s paintings of the Middle East avoid the crowded and bustling towns, preferring the barren desert where just a handful of people travel with their camels In the Arabian Desert (1882).

Bracht’s slightly later view From the Sinai Desert (1884) shows more groups on the move in the relentless heat. The ship of the desert indeed, but never argue with a half-ton camel, even if it’s an entry in a beauty pageant.