After the popularity of genre scenes and interiors in the Dutch Golden Age, the middle classes had less influence over themes in art until the nineteenth century.

They were then able to indulge in a few paintings and framed prints of their own, although most would have been family portraits rather than anything of greater aesthetic or cultural value. Matthäus Kern’s watercolour showing A Study Interior at St. Polten from 1837 is unusual for being an early pure interior, with no sign of figures, except in the portraits.

Then came Orientalist interiors.

Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment is his first Orientalist masterpiece, based in part on the watercolours and sketches made of local models during his visits to Morocco and Tangier, combined with studio work in Paris using a European model dressed in clothing the artist had brought back from North Africa. The black servant at the right appears to be an invention added for effect, as an extra touch of exoticism. The end result is harmonious, and makes exceptional use of light and colour, the fine details of the interior giving the image the air of complete authenticity.

In the mid-1850s, Théodore Chassériau’s Orientalism took the inevitable turn towards the erotic. This started with his Orientalist Interior: Nude in a Harem from 1850-52, referring strongly to Delacroix’s Women of Algiers, and equally rich in detail.

Narrative painting also started to turn away from classical themes, and became framed around open-ended narrative and ‘problem pictures’ to challenge those trying to read them.

As far as I can discover, one of the earliest major paintings that intentionally lacks narrative closure is William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, painted during the period 1851-53. As with most masterly narrative paintings, its story is assembled from a multitude of clues to be found in the image.

It shows a fashionable young man seated at a piano in a small if not cramped house in the leafy suburbs of London, in reality Saint John’s Wood. Half-risen from the man’s lap is a young woman who stares absently into the distance. They’re clearly a couple in an intimate relationship, but conspicuous by its absence is any wedding ring on the fourth finger of the woman’s left hand, at the focal point of the painting. This is, therefore, extra-marital.

The interior around them has signs that she’s a kept mistress with time on her hands. Her companion, a cat, is under the table, where it has caught a bird with a broken wing, a symbol of her plight. At the right edge is a tapestry with which she whiles away the hours, and her wools below form a tangled web in which she is entwined. On top of the gaudy upright piano is a clock. By the hem of her dress is her lover’s discarded glove, symbolising her ultimate fate when he discards her into prostitution. The room itself is decorated as gaudily as the piano, in poor taste.

The couple have been singing together from Thomas Moore’s Oft in the Stilly Night when she appears to have undergone some revelatory experience, causing her to rise. For Hunt this is associated with a verse from the Old Testament book of Proverbs: “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.” Ironically, his model was his girlfriend at the time, Annie Miller, an uneducated barmaid who was just sixteen.

The only artist in the nineteenth century who seems to have painted any significant number of narrative works based on popular contemporary writers is Robert Braithwaite Martineau. The Tate Gallery has two such paintings of his: above is Kit’s Writing Lesson (1852), showing a less than memorable scene from Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, with its elaborately detailed interior. The other (not shown here) is Picciola (1853), based on the 1836 novel of the same name by the obscure French novelist Xavier Boniface Saintine (1798-1865).

Rebecca Solomon’s Appointment (1861) appears to be another early problem picture, with a deliberately open-ended narrative set in an interior. A beautiful woman stands in front of a mirror, and looks intently at a man, who is only seen in his reflection in the mirror, and is standing in a doorway behind the viewer’s right shoulder. The woman is dressed to go out, and is holding a letter in her gloved hands. The clock on the mantlepiece shows that it’s about thirteen minutes past seven.

John Everett Millais painted his Eve of St Agnes in 1863, in the King’s Bedroom in the Jacobean house at Knole Park, near Sevenoaks in Kent. His model is his wife Effie, formerly Euphemia Gray, who married John Ruskin, and is here set in a rich period interior.

The last of these open-ended narratives set in interiors is the most puzzling, Edgar Degas’s Interior from 1868-9, also known as The Rape.

A man and a woman are in a bedroom together. She’s at the left, partly kneeling down, facing to the left, and partially (un)dressed. He’s at the right, fully dressed in street clothes, standing in front of the door, with his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.

The woman’s outer clothing is placed at the foot of the bed, and her corset has been hurriedly or carelessly cast onto the floor beside the bed. She clearly arrived in the room before the man, removed her outer clothing, and at some stage started to undress further, halting when she was down to her shift or chemise. Alternatively, she may have undressed completely, and at this moment have dressed again as far as her chemise.

Just behind the woman is a small occasional table, on which there is a table-lamp and a small open suitcase. Some of the contents of the suitcase rest over its edge. In front of it, on the table top, is a small pair of scissors and other items from a clothes repair kit or ‘housewife’. There’s a wealth of detail that can fuel many different accounts of what is going on in this interior.

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.

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.

Tomorrow we celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of the great equine artist George Stubbs (1724-1806). In his honour, this article looks at some of the finest paintings of horses following Stubbs’ examples from the late eighteenth century.

Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) was probably introduced to the painting of horses when he was a student of Carle Vernet in Paris, from 1808. He developed his skills in the stables of the palace at Versailles, and became an accomplished rider himself.

In 1812, Géricault submitted his first painting to the Salon. The Charging Chasseur (1812) was not only accepted, but attained such critical acclaim that he was awarded a gold medal, and his future appeared bright. It’s rich with fine detail in the metalwork of the horse’s headstall, and the chasseur’s tunic.

In 1820, Géricault accompanied his masterwork The Raft of the Medusa for exhibition in London, and remained in England until the following year. His Epsom Derby painted in 1821 follows the convention of the day in showing galloping racehorses flying through the air without contact with the ground beneath them. The Derby Stakes is a flat race that has been run on Epsom Downs, to the south of London, since 1780. At this time it was run on a Thursday in late May or early June, despite the unseasonal weather seen here.

Tragically, horse riding was also contributor to Géricault’s undoing and untimely death in 1824, at the age of only thirty-two.

Although the British painter James Ward (1769–1859) didn’t set out to specialise in the painting of horses, during the first couple of decades of the nineteenth century he painted the portraits of several famous racehorses.

By 1820, Ward was struggling to make ends meet from his art. He struck lucky with two prominent paintings, The Deer Stealer, commissioned by Theophilus Levett, and this portrait of Dr. Syntax, a Bay Racehorse, Standing in a Coastal Landscape, an Estuary Beyond (1820). Doctor Syntax (1811-38) was owned by Ralph Riddell, and raced only in northern England, where he was one of the most successful racehorses of all time. His portrait was painted twice by John Frederick Herring, Senior, and Ward’s turn came in 1820, when the horse won all four of his recorded races.

Some of Ward’s later paintings of a white horse confronting a huge and menacing boa constrictor (or ‘Liboya Serpent’) have survived. The Moment (1831) is probably the best of these, with its unusually sketchy background.

Horace Vernet (1789–1863), son of Carle who had taught the young Géricault, is best-known for his paintings of battles, including those of the French colonisation of Algeria. He was also among the early artists to have been inspired by Lord Byron’s narrative poem Mazeppa, first published in 1819.

Vernet’s Mazeppa and the Wolves from 1826 is one of several that he painted of this story.

Théodore Géricault was the young Eugène Delacroix’s (1798–1863) great friend and mentor, and influenced the latter’s paintings of horses.

Shortly after Géricault’s untimely death, Delacroix visited tales of chivalry in Combat Between Two Horsemen in Armour, painted at some time between 1825-30.

Delacroix painted this spirited watercolour of a Horse Frightened by Lightning in the same period.

In 1835, Delacroix returned to Lord Byron’s Orientalist tale of the Giaour, and painted this version of the Combat of the Giaour and Hassan. This time he had the benefit of watching Moroccan cavalry manoeuvres, and a commission from the Comte de Mornay, who had led the diplomatic mission that had earlier taken the artist to North Africa. The resulting composition is radically different from his earlier version, and although Mornay seems to have been pleased with the result, the critics were less impressed.

In 1861, shortly before Delacroix’s death, Edgar Degas’ (1834–1917) interest in horseracing was kindled when he visited a former schoolfriend on his country estate. From about 1869 onwards, his paintings of horseracing often contained substantial landscape passages, and some were perhaps more landscape than racing.

Degas’ At the Races in the Countryside from 1869 combines three contrasting uses for horses: in the foreground a pair are drawing a family in their carriage, in the middle distance they are being ridden as a means of transport, and deeper still they are racing on the flat.

Horses in a Meadow (1871) is particularly interesting for its inclusion of industrial elements, in the form of smoking chimneys and the steam vessels in the river behind. These are often cited as being characteristic of Impressionist paintings, but are equally typical of Degas’ pursuit of images showing ‘modern life’.

Finally, Degas’ later Jockeys on Horseback before Distant Hills (1884) shows a group of racehorses idling about as their riders talk, probably prior to a race.

Tomorrow I’ll tell of the unusual career of George Stubbs, who specialised in painting portraits of racehorses.