This second collection of paintings that were made one hundred years ago, in 1924, opens with some narrative works, followed by a couple of interiors, miscellaneous works, and ends with an early sporting painting.

Lovis Corinth’s Trojan Horse proved to be his last major painting from classical myth, showing the wooden horse made by the Greeks to gain access to the city of Troy so they could destroy it. The city is seen in the background, with its lofty towers and impregnable walls. The select group of Greek soldiers who undertook this commando raid are already concealed inside the horse, and those around it are probably Trojans sent from the city to check it out.

Although there are suggestions of an allegorical relationship between this painting and the First World War, Troy had been a hot topic in Berlin since the excavations at Hisarlık in Turkey in the late nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld.

Ker-Xavier Roussel’s Sleeping Diana uses a simpler motif of the goddess asleep under the watchful eye of one of her devotees, as a deer comes to drink at the pool between them.

Kazimierz Sichulski’s Bacchanal shows three naked bacchantes cavorting with Bacchus. This is set during the grape harvest, with bowls of the fruit and a couple of donkeys laden with buckets for the crop.

Mykola Ivasyuk’s Riders on the Steppe is one of this Ukrainian artist’s late Cossack paintings. Two years later, Ivasyuk was appointed professor at the Kyiv Art Institute, but started to fall out of favour and was transferred to Odesa, where criticism became more serious. In the autumn of 1937, he was arrested, imprisoned, convicted of being a terrorist on the basis of his art, and was shot by a firing squad in Kyiv on 25 November 1937. Much of his art was confiscated or destroyed, and it wasn’t until 1980 that he was rehabilitated and his surviving paintings could be seen again.

In Édouard Vuillard’s Reading in the Dining Room, Vaucresson, Lucy Hessel has already left her husband Jos reading the newspaper at the breakfast table, and gone to busy herself in the next room. Behind this mundane domestic scene is deeper complexity: Jos and Lucy Hessel were close friends of the artist, so close that at the time of this painting Vuillard, then in his mid-fifties, and Lucy were lovers.

Until relatively recently, Icelandic society remained strongly traditional, and homes in its capital Reykjavik were still decorated in older style. Þórarinn Þorláksson’s glimpse into The Artist’s Home shows this well.

I believe that Henri Le Sidaner’s White Garden at Dusk shows a corner of the artist’s garden in the old village of Gerberoy.

The pioneer Swedish natural history painter Bruno Liljefors never lost his fascination for the relationship between predators and prey, as seen in his Sea Eagles Chasing an Eider.

By the early years of the twentieth century, circuses were an established if itinerant part of society. Children in neighbourhoods engaged in circus games, as shown so delightfully in Heinrich Zille’s lithograph Circus Games.

When Charles Demuth was unwell as a result of his diabetes he sought solace in floral paintings, such as these exquisite Fruit and Sunflowers.

Lovis Corinth sometimes painted purely for fun: this superb depiction of a Königsberger Marzipantorte (Royal Marzipan Cake) must have been completed at speed before his family consumed the model.

The American artist George Bellows is perhaps best-known for his paintings and prints of boxing matches, many of them clandestine. Dempsey and Firpo, though, shows a famous historic boxing match between the heavyweights Jack Dempsey, world champion since 1919, and Luis Ángel Firpo, an Argentinian challenger. This took place in the Polo Grounds of New York City on 14 September 1923.

From the start of the first round, the fight was gripping in excitement, with Dempsey knocking Firpo down seven times. Towards the end of the first round, Dempsey was trapped against the ropes, and Firpo knocked him out of the ring, the moment shown here. Dempsey finally knocked Firpo out late in the second round. This was made from contemporary press photographs.

With the Age of Enlightenment, former associations of butterflies became obscure, and they were most often included in increasingly faithful paintings of natural history.

Painted in 1804, Johann Amandus Winck’s magnificent still life of Flowers and Fruits on a Stone Ledge with Butterflies and Mice makes good use of two butterflies, a housefly (perhaps a vanitas reference), a mouse and a snail.

For William Holman Hunt, in his Our English Coasts, 1852, native species of butterfly were a symbol of the British countryside. Composed from several passages from different motifs, it was assembled in a similar way to the Pre-Raphaelites’ figurative works. Hunt went to great lengths to work from nature: the peacock butterflies at the lower left were one of the last details to be completed, and were painted from a single live specimen the artist examined indoors after the rest of the painting was all but complete.

One of the few paintings that captures the experience of dense clouds of butterflies is Gustave Doré’s Summer from about 1860-70. Set in what appears to be an upland or alpine meadow, its butterflies look like large flowers that have taken to the air.

In Charles Edward Perugini’s undated Ephemeral Joy, a young woman who has been picking flowers in a garden pauses with a brimstone butterfly on the back of her hand. This species was seen as quintessentially British, although it’s widespread throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa.

Although numerous paintings of butterflies had been made from dead specimens, some of the earliest to attempt to show them in realistic environments appeared in the late nineteenth century, thanks to new wildlife artists like the masterly Bruno Liljefors. Redstarts and Butterflies, from 1885, shows what the artist called ‘five studies in one frame’, five separate studies from nature combined into a single image, including this very dark small tortoiseshell butterfly, which is about to become a meal for one of the insectivorous redstarts.

Late in his career, Vincent van Gogh painted the largest European species of moth, the giant peacock moth, in 1889. Its wingspan can reach 20 cm (8 inches).

The following year, van Gogh painted Butterflies and Poppies (1890), showing what are probably two clouded yellow butterflies rather than brimstones. This appears to have been painted on unprimed canvas.

The Japanese Western-style artist Fujishima Takeji 藤島武二 painted Butterflies in 1904, just before he travelled to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. Like Doré’s painting above, this shows a dense cloud of butterflies gathering around flowers.

In the twentieth century, butterflies provided an opportunity for artistic invention to take flight. Odilon Redon’s Butterflies, from around 1910, shows a highly imaginative collection of butterflies, flowers, plants, and rocks, many being outlined to emphasise their form.

In Anastasiya Markovich’s recent Effect of Butterfly, the insect’s wings are breaking up into shreds of unreality.

My final painting of this selection is in many ways the most fascinating, based on scenes from one of William Shakespeare’s plays set in faerie style by Richard Dadd during his confinement in London’s Bethlem hospital for the mentally ill.

Dadd’s Contradiction: Oberon and Titania from 1854-8 develops his early faerie paintings into a new and unique style, and was painted for the hospital’s first resident Physician-Superintendent, William Charles Hood.

Dadd takes its theme from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and there’s hardly a square millimetre of canvas into which he hasn’t squeezed yet another curious detail. Like other great imaginative painters such as Bosch before, Dadd’s dense details dart about in scale: there are tiny figures next to huge leaves and butterflies, and towards the top of this tondo these distortions of scale generate an exaggerated feeling of perspective.

The contradiction of the title refers to the battle of wills between Oberon and Titania centred on an Indian boy. Titania, inevitably somewhat masculine, stands just to the right of centre, the boy bearing her skirts. To the left of centre is the bearded figure of Oberon, an elfin lad holding him back by his right arm. At the right are Helena and Demetrius whose love remains unrequited despite Helena’s efforts. Beyond those central figures is an overwhelming mass of detail, miniature scenes and stories involving hundreds of extras, flowers (including the ‘Morning Glory’ convulvulus at the feet of Titania), leaves, an ornate swallowtail butterfly, a floating jade egg, fungi, and far more.

I think that’s the best place to end.