After death, most of us will end up in a coffin, sometimes known euphemistically as a casket. Despite their widespread use, they seldom appear in paintings, perhaps because they obscure the body. Although there’s no shortage of deaths in classical myth and legend, I’ve been unable to find any conventional narrative painting that includes a coffin. There is, though, one remarkable history painting that does.

This is Francisco Pradilla’s painting of Doña Juana “la Loca” – Juana or Joanna the Mad – from 1877, which won the Medal of Honour at the National Exhibition in Spain, went on to the Exposition Universel in Paris, and won further acclaim in Berlin.

Queen Joanna of Castile, or Juana the Mad, brought about the union of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, forming the basis of modern Spain. She married Philip the Handsome in 1496, shortly before her seventeenth birthday. He was crowned king of Castile in 1506, and was the first of the Habsburg monarchs in Spain. He died suddenly later that year, probably from typhoid fever, and Juana became mentally ill, refusing to let Philip’s body be buried. This is the basis of Pradilla’s painting, where Juana is shown in the nun’s habit she would have worn when she was eventually secreted into a convent. When her father, Ferdinand II, died in 1516, Juana inherited Aragon, and Spain was ruled under the personal union of her son Charles I, who was also elected Holy Roman Emperor.

Coffins do appear more in symbolic roles.

In 1923-24, Albin Egger-Lienz painted a thoroughly modern account of the Resurrection of Christ. His finished painting includes contemporary peasants, and the risen Christ standing in his own coffin.

They also appear in Frederic, Lord Leighton’s unusual And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It (1892), whose title is a quotation from the Book of Revelation:
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
(Revelation Chapter 20, verse 13.)

Considered to be one of his most dramatic paintings, it was initially intended to decorate Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, but was rejected as unsuitable. It was then commissioned at reduced size by Henry Tate for his new gallery of British art, now The Tate Gallery in London.

Unlike much of the fearsome imagery of the Second Coming described in the book of Revelation, this is essentially an optimistic scene, being the resurrection and spiritual salvation of those who have died at sea, an all too common fate around the British coast. A central family group shows stages of awakening: the man has been fully awakened, his son is just starting to breathe but still white, and his wife still bears the pale green hue of the dead.

Around them, others are likewise being awoken from their coffins, presumably from burial at sea, or from the water itself. Leighton’s tones and colours refer to Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819), by far the most famous painting of shipwreck and death at sea, with which Leighton was very familiar. There are also references to Michelangelo’s Entombment (1500-1), in the National Gallery and a favourite of Leighton’s at the time.

This third version of Arnold Böcklin’s famous Island of the Dead was painted in 1883 for his dealer. As with others he painted, this shows a coffin being brought by boat to the island for interment.

The few other paintings of coffins show them in more ordinary funerals.

At the end of his training in Munich, Teodor Axentowicz paid his first visit to the lands of the Hutsul people, in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. His oil painting of a Hutsul Funeral from 1882 shows the Hutsul in the rigours of winter, the coffin being towed on a sledge behind a cart, and the mourners clutching candles as they make their way through the snow to the stave church in the distance.

Jakub Schikaneder’s finished version of The Sad Way from 1886 shows a single weary horse drawing the cart bearing a coffin. The woman, presumably a widow before her time, stares emptily at the rutted mud track, as a man walks beside them. In the background is the floodplain of a river in full flood. It appears to be in the late autumn, with the last of the brown leaves remaining on the trees. Schikaneder’s world is barren, bleak, and forlorn.

In his village in Norway, Nikolai Astrup recorded the public rites of the community, as in his Funeral Day in Jølster (before 1908). With the grandeur of the hills behind, a small party escorts the coffin of one of the villagers. The artist’s father, the pastor, leads the procession to the small churchyard.

Perhaps the most famous painting of a burial in European art is that below, Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1849-50).

Courbet’s monumental Burial at Ornans (1849-50), shows in remarkably unemotional and objective terms the funeral of the artist’s great uncle in this small provincial town. The event took place in September 1848, but the painting gives the impression that it is a faithful record.

Courbet actually painted the work entirely in the studio, using those who were present as models. It shows a moment that could only have existed in the artist’s memory: like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, it doesn’t necessarily represent an image that ever existed in reality. But it has been carefully researched, imagined, composed, and painted to give the impression of accuracy and objectivity, rather than some Romantic fantasy. Another feature it has in common is that its most significant object, the coffin, is almost obscured here by the bearers.

Finally, there’s one painting that explores one of the great fears of the nineteenth century, that of being presumed dead and being buried alive.

After his mother’s death, Antoine Wiertz became progressively more obsessed with death. His Premature Burial (1854) visits this not uncommon dread of the nineteenth century: that of being presumed dead, buried, and then recovering to find yourself in a coffin. This did happen, particularly during cholera epidemics, as indicated by the lettering on the opening coffin. The profound shock resulting from choleric dehydration could make the pulse and breathing so feeble as to escape detection; with hundreds or thousands of dead, many were dumped hurriedly into mass-produced coffins and so into mass graves. And a very few managed to survive, leading to coffins being designed with bells that could be rung by a recovered occupant. Wiertz’s victim is left with the nightmare scenario of trying to make it back to the land of the living.

For countless generations, since humans first started farming the land, improving the soil and fields has been a constant task. Once the plough has passed, there’s still work to be done in many areas, where there are stones mixed in the soil. This has been the burden of those who have worked the land, and has been featured in occasional paintings.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Worn Out (1889) follows in the Naturalist tradition of Jules Bastien-Lepage. An old man has collapsed when working in the fields. A younger woman, his daughter perhaps, is giving him aid and shouting for all she’s worth to summon assistance. The soil around them is poor, and full of flints; the two were engaged in the toil of the poorest of the poor, picking out the large stones and putting them into piles for collection. It’s backbreaking work for the young, and clearly proved too much for this man.

Once ploughed to a fine tilth and rid of its stones, the soil is ready for the seed of the next crop, accomplished by manual broadcasting, a term in common use long before it came to be applied to radio then TV transmissions.

Sowing is one of the basic tasks in arable farming, and one at the heart of the changes that took place between 1600 and 1900. Broadcasting is tedious, time-consuming and inefficient in use of seed, making it one of the first tasks for attempts to mechanise farming. Although early types of seed drill had been tried before, it’s Jethro Tull, an English gentleman farmer from the early eighteenth century, who has generally been credited with inventing the first successful seed drill, in 1701. Today his name is better-known as that of one of the great rock bands formed in 1967.

Alongside the use of a seed drill was the requirement for a horse hoe, a light and small plough drawn by a single horse, to ensure the seed was well covered by soil. Unfortunately, early drills proved too fragile for general use, and it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that metal could be turned to manufacture more durable drills, that became widespread across Western Europe during the rest of that century. However, contemporary painting continued to show sowers still broadcasting seed.

The first of these is Jean-François Millet’s The Sower, completed in 1850, shown at the Salon that year and now recognised as his first real masterpiece. It shows an agricultural worker striding across a field, broadcasting seed for the summer’s crop. In the distance to the right, and caught in the sunlight, is another worker harrowing with a pair of oxen. This was being used to ensure the seed sown was covered with soil, and not exposed to the flurry of birds trying to eat any seed left on the surface.

Millet revisited his successful painting of a sower from fifteen years earlier, here with two pastel paintings with the same title, The Sower, from around 1865. That above is now in the Walters, and that below in the Clark. These feature a different background, including the tower of Chailly, harrowing using a pair of horses, and a swirling flock of crows in the sky.

By the late nineteenth century, manual broadcasting was becoming less common as farms turned to seed drills, but the image of the sower continued to appear in paintings.

The title of Hans Thoma’s Säender Bauer (1886) apparently means Sowing Framer (thanks to Gregory for his accurate translation). A sower in Millet’s tradition is at work in the ploughed field in the foreground. Beyond, the heavens have opened in a sudden downpour. Two years later, when he was living in Arles in November 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his version of The Sower.

Millet’s influence is also manifest in the first of Albin Egger-Lienz’s versions of The Sower, from 1903, a motif which was to recur in his later works. Its earth colours, increasing looseness, and emphasis on simplicity were to set the style for much of the rest of his career.

Laurits Andersen Ring admired Millet’s social realism, and would undoubtedly have seen at least one of Millet’s depictions of this motif. In 1910, Ring painted this, The Sower, in such great detail that you can see every seed frozen in mid-air. This suggests that he may have been influenced by photography, the first means of producing such images.

Ring’s friend and contemporary Hans Andersen Brendekilde responded in 1914 with A Sower on a Sunny Spring Day at Brendekilde Church. This is thought to show Holme-Olstrup Church, near Næstved on the island of Sjælland (Zealand), close to where Brendekilde was born and from where he had taken his name. The sower, walking over poor soil with abundant stones, has been identified as Ole Frederik Jensen (1870-1953).

This motif seems to have long outlasted the practice of broadcasting. By 1900, even gardeners and smallholders were being offered mechanical seed drills. As those used less than a third of the seed than broadcasting, it’s hard to see any farmer in the early twentieth century still preferring traditional methods.

With the young plants growing vigorously, all that remained for the growing season was to keep them free from weeds, another laborious and back-breaking task often assigned to women.

The Weeders (1868) is a smaller variant of a painting of the same name that Jules Breton made in 1860, which was acclaimed when exhibited in the Salon the following year and the Exposition Universelle in 1867. Set in the fields just outside Courrières, the labourers are pulling up thistles and other weeds until the last moment that there is insufficient light for them to work any longer. Breton wrote of their faces encircled by the pink transparency of their violet bonnets, as if worshipping the life-giving star.

Although only peasants, the light transforms these women into classical beauties, an observation made by the critics at the time. This gives rise to a phenomenon repeated across Breton’s panoramas of country work, in which these classical figures appear in thoroughly socially-realist landscapes, showing their sanctity in labour.

Jakub Schikaneder’s Weeder (1887) shows a woman bent double as she pulls weeds from a young crop, and would pass for a social realist work from the likes of Millet or Breton.