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.

Since ancient times there have been some who need to live in temporary shelters. If you don’t have a dense wood to hand, then one of the better options is a tent consisting of animal skins or fabric stretched over a frame. If you want to be truly nomadic, then you can pack up your tent and tow it around wherever you want to go. This pair of articles looks at paintings featuring tents; today’s mainly in depictions of stories and events that took place in the more distant past, and tomorrow’s concentrates on their more modern use.

Armies have long been one of the main users of tents, to accommodate their many soldiers in field conditions. For the Greek forces during the war against Troy, that meant a period of ten years. Having lived in a two-man tent in the Antarctic for a period of nine months over the winter, that’s actually not as arduous as it might sound.

Tiepolo shows some of those tents in his fresco in the Villa Valmarana, Vicenza, from 1757. This, the last of them, shows the scene as Eurybates and Talthybius Take Briseis, Achilles’ Concubine, to Agamemnon, who presumably was also living under canvas throughout. As you’ll see in the paintings below, these tents are conical, and likely to be constructed around a central pole or stave.

Francesco de’ Rossi’s fresco of The Inhabitants of Sutrium Supplicate to Camillus to Free them from Tyranny shows a moment in early Roman history, with Camillus and his troops camped outside the town, when the city of Rome was being sacked by Gauls in around 390 BCE. Again, these tents are conical and of similar appearance.

Albrecht Altdorfer’s breathtaking view of the Battle of Issus (1529), fought between Alexander the Great and Darius III of the Achaemenid Empire, in 333 BC, shows a large tented camp in the distance.

Charles Le Brun’s account of The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander, also called The Tent of Darius, is faithful to Plutarch, in placing this event in Darius’ abandoned tent. This appears a more ornate structure, and lacks a central pole, being most probably set on a wooden frame.

Johann Georg Platzer’s magnificent Rococo The Amazon Queen, Thalestris, in the Camp of Alexander the Great, was painted on copper towards the middle of the eighteenth century. At its centre are the figures of a monarch who could be Thalestris, wearing her crown, waving with her right hand to the arriving Amazons, and showing a fine pair of legs. Next to her is Alexander, who seems to be talking to or about the horse to the right of him (on his left), who could be Bucephalus. Alexander’s tent is great indeed, and pyramidal rather than conical in form, although others look simpler.

The armies that left Europe to fight the Crusades also lived for long periods in tents. Those are shown in paintings of Torquato Tassi’s epic Jerusalem Delivered, a fictional account of the first Crusade of 1096-99.

Here, David Teniers the Younger shows Armida before Godfrey of Bouillon (1628-30), amid the tents of the Christian forces, complete with their guy lines, used to tension and brace the structure.

Ary Scheffer’s painting of The Death of Saint Louis from about 1817 is one of a pair commemorating the death of the French King Saint Louis IX (1214-1270). He was a great reformer who got rid of barbarism from justice, including the banning of trials by ordeal. Louis took part in the seventh and eighth Crusades, and died of dysentery during an epidemic that struck the latter. This shows him in a tent on the Libyan coast in the throes of death, surrounded by his court, with the high spears of warriors in the left background.

William Hogarth’s portrait of David Garrick as Richard III from about 1745 shows William Shakespeare’s character waking in his tent with a start following a dream. In the distance are the long rows of conical tents housing his army.

Marià Fortuny’s vast and uncompleted canvas of The Battle of Tetouan (1862-66) shows Spanish forces attacking an Arab camp, to the left, as they advanced towards the city of Tétouan in Morocco in February 1860.

Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin’s After the Attack. Plevna, 1877-1878 (1881) is a brutally frank depiction of the human devastation at a field hospital, with the wounded, dying and dead littered outside its long framed tents.

Although birth hasn’t proved such a popular theme in paintings, there are countless depictions of death. Dominant among them in European works are those of the Crucifixion, but in this brief survey I concentrate on those showing figures from myth, history and contemporary life, particularly those of deathbed scenes, and omit religious paintings entirely.

Adonis is perhaps the only figure whose birth and death have been popular in paintings. Following his strange birth from the myrrh tree, when he was a young adult he bled to death after he had been gored by a wild boar while he was hunting.

Hendrik Goltzius’ startlingly foreshortened projection of the Dying Adonis from 1609 pushes his face and head into the distance and makes their features almost unreadable, while his feet take pride of place and you can even read their soles.

Piero di Cosimo’s wonderful painting of a dying nymph uses the full width of a panoramic panel to show a satyr with his goat legs and distinctive ears, ministering to the nymph, who has a severe wound in her throat. At her feet is a hunting dog, with another three in the distance. Sometimes claimed to show the death of Procris by a javelin thrown by her husband Cephalus, this tells a different and unidentified story.

The death of Dido is more easy to identify, particularly in this depiction by Henry Fuseli, from 1781.

Dido has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then fell on the sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast. Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, confirming to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he heads towards the horizon, and the eventual founding of Rome.

The story of lovers Pyramus and Thisbe and their tragic deaths has been popular with painters since classical times. When they arrange to meet outside the city, she flees from a lioness, leaving her bloodied cloak. He then arrives and assumes that she has been killed by the lioness and falls on his sword. She returns to find him dying, and falls on his sword so they can be reunited in death. Their spilt blood turns the fruit of the mulberry bush from white to red.

This version from the ruins of Pompeii includes all the main cues, with the lioness in the distance, and a mulberry tree with its white fruit. Its composition has remained in use for the two millennia since then.

More recent legends, particularly those of King Arthur, have formed the basis for some notable painted deathbed scenes.

In James Archer’s The Death of King Arthur from about 1860, the dying Arthur is surrounded by four women, as the black boat approaches the beach behind them. At the right, the ghostly figure of an angel holding a chalice is materialising, in accordance with Sir Thomas Malory’s popular literary account.

Many historical figures have been portrayed in their final moments.

In Paul Delaroche’s Death of Elizabeth I, Queen of England (1828) the haggard queen is shown slumped on a makeshift bed on the floor, putting her low in the painting. Her maids and other female attendants are in distress behind her, supporting the pillows on which her head rests. I presume that the male kneeling by the queen and extending his right hand towards her is Robert Cecil, leader of the government at the time, and behind him are other members of the Privy Council of England, who were shortly to install Elizabeth’s successor.

Benjamin West’s best-known painting of The Death of General Wolfe (1770) shows a scene from an almost uniquely brief battle between British and French forces on 13 September 1759, which lasted only an hour or so. At the end of their three months siege of the French city of Quebec, Canada, British forces under the command of General Wolfe were preparing to take the city by force. The French attacked the British line on a plateau just outside the city.

Within minutes, Wolfe suffered three gunshot wounds, and died quickly. The French commander, General Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, was also hit by a musket ball, and died the following morning. The British line held, and the French were forced to evacuate the city, ultimately leading to France ceding most of its possessions in North America to Britain, in the Treaty of Paris of 1763. Wolfe’s death was quickly seen as the ultimate sacrifice of a commander in securing victory, West’s underlying theme here.

Just over twenty years later, it was the turn of the French Revolution to provide a more equivocal hero.

On the morning of 13 July 1793, Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Normandy, turned up at the Paris house of Jean-Paul Marat, one of Revolution’s most influential radicals, asking to see him; his fiancée turned her away. She gained entry later that evening, and started giving him the names of some local counter-revolutionaries. While he was writing them down, she drew a kitchen knife with a 15 cm (6 inch) blade from her clothing, and plunged it into Marat’s chest, killing him rapidly.

David’s famous painting shows Marat’s body slumped over the side of his bath, the murder weapon and his quill both on the floor, the pen still in his right hand, and a handwritten note in his left hand. Corday was executed in public by guillotine on 17 July. Marat became a martyr for the cause, after his friend David had organised one of the spectacular funerals for which he had become known.

When Théodore Géricault, who had painted The Raft of the Medusa in 1818-19, died in Paris on 26 January 1824, the young and promising history painter Ary Scheffer painted his tribute as The Death of Théodore Géricault (1824). At the artist’s bedside are his close friends Colonel Bro de Comères and the painter Pierre-Joseph Dedreux-Dorcy, and the wall of the room is covered by his paintings.

When Claude Monet’s first wife was dying in the late summer of 1879, he painted his tribute to her in Camille Monet on her Deathbed (1879). She appears to be surrounded by diaphanous feathers that rise on either side of her head to form angelic wings. She was only 32, and they had two children.

By the Deathbed (1895) is Edvard Munch’s painting from memory of his sister Sophie resting in her deathbed in 1877, when she was 15 and the artist wasn’t quite 14 years old. She died of tuberculosis, an unfortunately common event at the time. Munch explained that, when painting from memory like this, he depicted only what he could remember, and was careful to avoid trying to add details that he no longer saw. This explains its relative simplicity.

Sophie is seen from her head, looking along her length to her feet, her figure compressed into almost nothing by extreme foreshortening. Her deathbed resembles the next step, in which her body will be laid out in a coffin prior to burial. More than half the painting is filled by the rest of the family, father with his hands clasped in intense prayer. At the right is their mother, who had died of tuberculosis herself nearly nine years earlier.

Like Manet and the French Impressionists, Marià Fortuny painted motifs that challenged social attitudes of the day. His portrait of Miss Del Castillo on her Deathbed from 1871 shows a similar scene to Monet’s later painting above.

Sometimes, deathbed and other posthumous portraits prove too great a challenge.

Maria Munk, known as Ria, had been engaged to the actor and writer Hanns Heinz Ewers; when he called off their engagement, she committed suicide just after Christmas in 1911, by shooting herself in the chest. Gustav Klimt was commissioned by Ria’s family to paint a posthumous portrait of her, and first made Ria Munk on her Deathbed, initially completed in 1912 but here dated to 1917-18. She is manifestly dead, and surrounded by floral tributes. The family rejected the work, finding it too distressing, and asked Klimt to depict her when she had still been alive, from photographs.

A second portrait completed in 1916 was also rejected, although there’s doubt about the identity of the painting, and the reason for its rejection. Klimt started his third attempt in 1917, and was still working on it early the following year. It was clearly going to be one of his richly decorated paintings, with abundant colourful flowers in the background, and brilliant peppers and other vegetables. In early January 1918, Klimt caught the deadly influenza that had just started to spread across Europe. He quickly developed pneumonia, suffered a stroke, and died on 6 February 1918.

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.

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.