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.