Most urban societies have had some form of police, in addition to soldiers and armed guards. In the Roman Empire these were known as lictors, employed to act as bodyguards to magistrates, who could also arrest suspects and punish offenders under the magistrate’s authority.

Henryk Siemiradzki’s Christian Dirce of 1897 refers to Dirce, a figure in Greek mythology who was killed by being tied to the horns of a bull. Accounts of Roman martyrdoms report that the killing of Christian women sometimes occurred in enactments of the death of Dirce, hence the scene shown here, in which a woman’s near-naked body is draped over the body of a bull. Siemiradzki shows the emperor and his entourage, including two lictors holding their fasces, symbolic rods and axes, gazing at the grim aftermath. The word Fascism is derived from the fasces, which are themselves often symbolic of Fascist groups.

Various police forces evolved across Europe after the Middle Ages, but it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that they became recognisable in modern form, with organised professionals. Although by no means the first, the city of London’s Metropolitan Police force was created by Act of Parliament in 1829, and quickly became known as Peelers after the minister responsible.

These police forces adopted distinctive dress, typically dark blue, to set them apart from civil guard and other military formations. Most also wore headgear that made them instantly recognisable as officers of the law.

Jules Breton’s first masterpiece, The Gleaners (1854), shows their oversight by the garde champêtre or village policeman, an older man distinguished by his official hat and armband, who was probably an army veteran.

William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station (1862) is set in the crowded and busy Paddington railway station in London that had only been completed a decade earlier by the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The centre of action is at the right of the painting, where an arrest is being made, shown in the detail below. A man dressed in brown clothes is about to board the train, within which a woman stares aghast at the scene. Two Scotland Yard detectives, complete with top hats, are in the process of serving him a warrant for his arrest, the other stood ready with a pair of handcuffs.

Police forces came to the fore later in the century when industrial unrest spread across the coalfields of Europe.

One of the first prominent paintings of a strike is Alfred Philippe Roll’s Miners’ Strike, exhibited in the Salon of 1880 or perhaps the following year. It’s most probably based on a strike at Denain in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield of that year. It shows the desperate and increasingly worrying gathering of striking miners and their families. A woman is restraining one man from throwing a rock at the pithead buildings. Mounted police are present, handcuffing one of the strikers.

Police also became involved in the regulation of prostitution in some cities.

Just before Christmas 1886, Christian Krohg’s first novel Albertine was published by a left-wing publisher. Its central theme is prostitution in Norway at the time, and the police quickly seized all the copies they could find, banning it on the grounds of violating the good morals of the people. At the same time as he was writing that novel, Krohg had been working on his largest and most complex painting: Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87).

In the novel, Albertine starts as a poor seamstress, who is mistaken for a prostitute by the police officer in charge of the section controlling prostitutes. He plies her with alcohol then rapes her. She is summoned to be inspected by the police doctor, whose examination further violates her, making her think that she is destined to be a prostitute, and that is, of course, exactly what happens.

Albertine isn’t the prominent woman in the centre looking directly at the viewer: Krohg’s heroine is the simple and humble country girl at the front of the queue to go into the police doctor for inspection. Behind her is a motley line of women from a wide range of situations. At the right, in the corner of the room, is another country girl with flushed cheeks. Others are apparently more advanced in their careers, and stare at Albertine, whose profiled face is barely visible from behind her headscarf. Barring the way to the surgery door, and in control of the proceedings, is a policeman.

In Denmark, Erik Henningsen’s first major painting bears the enigmatic title of Summum jus, summa injuria. Infanticide (1886). The Latin quotation comes from Cicero’s De Officiis I, 33, and literally means the highest law, the greatest injustice. It is a warning still used that strict application of rights and the law carries the danger of doing some people a huge injustice, and Henningsen’s narrative is an important example of a serious social and legal problem at the time.

Two labourers are digging a small pit at the side of a track across sand dunes. They are supervised by two policemen, one of whom keeps a written record. Behind and to the right is another policeman who holds a young woman by the elbow. She looks down as she is petting a dog.

The subtitle provides the clue as to what is going on. The labourers are trying to find the body of a baby, who is the subject of a police investigation. The young woman is the child’s mother. Unmarried, she had the baby in secret, smothered it at birth, and disposed of its body. She knows that if her baby is discovered, her punishment will be severe. But this was the only course open to her, as having a baby out of wedlock was against accepted religious and moral standards of the day.

The following year, Henningsen’s Farmers in the Capital (1887) shows migrants freshly arrived in Copenhagen from the country. The father is speaking to a mounted policeman, presumably asking him for directions to their lodgings.

Krohg’s The Struggle for Existence (also translated as The Struggle for Survival) (1889) shows Karl Johan Street in Oslo in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread. A policeman, wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, walks in the distance, down the middle of the icy street, detached from the scene.

Henningsen’s Evicted from 1892 shows a family of four being evicted into the street in the winter snow. With them are their meagre possessions, including a saw suggesting the father may be a carpenter. In the background he is still arguing with a policeman.

José Uría’s After a Strike, from 1895, revolves around a strike and its violent consequence. The scene is a large forge that’s apparently standing idle because of a strike. At the far right is a row of mounted police, and what may be lifeless bodies laid out on the ground. Inside the factory a woman, presumably a wife, kneels and embraces her child, beside what is presumably the dead body of her husband, who was a worker there. Close to his body is a large hammer, apparently the instrument of his death. In the distance, one of two policemen comfort a younger woman.

The role of police forces has remained as controversial ever since.

The island of Zealand (Sjælland) lies between Germany and Scania (Skåne) in southern Sweden, on the south-western edge of the Baltic Sea, and is the most populous of the Danish islands. The capital Copenhagen (København) is on its eastern coast, looking across Øresund, the strait separating it from Malmö in Sweden.

Like most European cities, Copenhagen grew rapidly during the nineteenth century, from a population of just over 100,000 to four times that in 1901. Many of those migrated from the surrounding countryside, where they had farmed the land. This weekend I show paintings of the Zealand countryside from the early nineteenth century up to the 1930s.

Although JC Dahl had been born in Norway, he painted for much of his early career in Copenhagen, and later returned to the Zealand countryside. In 1829, he painted this Winter Landscape at Vordingborg, showing barren trees and snowy fields near the town of Vordingborg, in the south of Zealand. Plenty of sinister crows in the air and on the ground help build the sense of grim foreboding.

In Dahl’s Copenhagen Harbour by Moonlight (1846), he shows many ‘fully-rigged’ sailing ships in this major port at the south-western end of the Baltic Sea.

Painted in 1856, his Burning Windmill at Stege is an unusual brandje (a painting of fire) following a traditional sub-genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Although completed well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature. Stege is a small town on an island in the south of the Zealand archipelago.

Laurits Andersen adopted his surname Ring from the village where he was born in the south of Zealand. His Young Girl Looking out of a Roof Window (1885) eloquently expresses the feelings of a migrant from the countryside when trapped in a garret amid the grey urban roofscape of Copenhagen.

His painting of Harvest shows his brother cutting what’s most probably rye rather than wheat, as a “monument to the Danish peasant”. He painted this during the summer of 1885, when his brother was working on his farm near Fakse on Zealand.

Erik Henningsen’s painted record of Farmers in the Capital from 1887 is one of the few contemporary accounts of migrants from the country. This family group consists of an older man, the head of household, two younger women, and a young boy. Everyone else is wearing smart leather shoes or boots, but these four are still wearing filthy wooden clogs, with tattered and patched clothing. The two men are carrying a large chest containing the family’s worldly goods, and beside them is their farm dog. The father is speaking to a mounted policeman, presumably asking him for directions to their lodgings. The large brick building in the background is the second version of Copenhagen’s main railway station, opened in 1864, and replaced by the modern station in 1911.

LA Ring’s Mogenstrup Church (1888-89) shows an elderly couple in their tattered Sunday best clothing, slowly making their way home after attending this church near his home village of Ring. The man’s shoes are still polished and his top hat also shiny, but like many country couples these two were no strangers to hunger or deprivation.

In 1891, Ring visited Herman Kähler’s ceramics factory in Næstved in the south of Zealand, and in the adjacent village painted this rural genre work, Conversation in the Countryside, Lille Næstved. It shows a mother with her two young children talking to an older boy, who sits on a doorstep staring at the viewer. Although the mother and family appear clean and fairly well-dressed, the boy’s clothing is worn out and tattered. Running behind them is the small stream that functioned as the dirt road’s main drain. Most of the cottages are small, and thatched, with the chimney of Kähler’s factory in the background.

The bog at Carlsminde in Søllerød, Zealand from 1906 is one of LA Ring’s finest landscapes, although perhaps more appropriate for pre-Impressionist painting in the middle of the nineteenth century. It shows a lake in the grounds of a Baroque mansion in Søllerød, to the north of Copenhagen. This estate had been bought by Isak Glückstadt in 1903, who expanded it and had it landscaped around this lake, with its stock of pike and tench. Glückstadt seems to have been eccentric, at one time keeping two Indian elephants here.