I’m celebrating this Christmas in three parts. Today, for Christmas Eve, I ignore the excesses of the contemporary commercial feast and consider those less fortunate. On Christmas Day I’ll show some modern depictions of the Nativity, followed on Boxing Day by those of the Adorations.

In Christian tradition, Christmas isn’t all turkey and tinsel, but centred on a poor family living temporarily in an animal shed when Mary gave birth there.

Fritz von Uhde painted one of his finest modernised religious works, A Difficult Journey, in 1890. This imagines Joseph and the pregnant Mary walking on a rough muddy track to Bethlehem, in a wintry European village. Joseph has a carpenter’s saw on his back as the tired couple move on through the dank mist.

In more northern parts of Europe and North America, this time of year can be particularly challenging.

John Everett Millais’ view of Christmas Eve from 1887 is bleak. Bare trees, barren snow with just tracks, and a few crows foraging. The lights may be lit in the house behind those trees, but out here it feels pretty grim.

Appropriately, Christmas was a time for charity, although perhaps not as ostentatious as that shown by royalty.

The younger Carl Oesterley captured history in his painting of Queen Marie of Hanover Giving Presents to the Poor and Needy (1908). Princess Marie of Saxe-Altenburg, as I believe she’s more properly known, lived between 1818-1907. The artist’s father, Carl Oesterley senior, had been court painter to her family, but in 1866 her father’s kingdom was annexed by Prussia. The Princess married King George V of England, and her family never relinquished the throne. Princess Marie is shown as a saintly figure, bathed in light as the poor and needy, including a sick boy in the bed behind her, worship her grace.

Seven years later, in 1915, when the whole of Europe was engulfed by the Great War, Wojciech Kossak painted this Soldiers’ Christmas. The decorations on the small Christmas tree in the foreground echo the uniforms in their greyness. In the sky, a shellburst acts as a metaphor for the guiding star which led the Magi to the infant Jesus in Bethlehem, but below that celestial light these infantry soldiers must continue to fight.

The war’s end brought the deadly flu pandemic that reached even into the most remote communities, including those hidden among the maze of fjords to the north of Bergen in western Norway.

In Nikolai Astrup’s woodcut print of his family’s Christmas Eve at Sandalstrand from 1918, his wife and young son have fallen asleep exhausted, amid traditional Norwegian decorations, including a well-decked Christmas tree.

In the Norwegian capital of Oslo, then still named Kristiania, the Naturalist painter Christian Krohg saw Christmas Eve as an opportunity for redemption.

In Krohg’s Seamstress’s Christmas Eve from 1921, a young woman is in her garret bed-sit, where she has been toiling long hours at her sewing machine. An affluent couple, relatives or employers perhaps, have just arrived to give the young woman a Christmas tree, a large wicker basket of presents, and more. Maybe that young woman can still be saved from the fate brought on by her sweated labour at the sewing machine, and what was seen as her inevitable decline into prostitution.

Moralising approaches to Christmas had developed during the nineteenth century, initially in literature. A Christmas Carol wasn’t Charles Dickens’ first attempt at a Christmas story, but probably remains the most successful of any writer in the English language. Published on 19 December 1843, its first edition had completely sold out by Christmas Eve, and in its first year it was released in no less than thirteen editions.

One edition of A Christmas Carol published in 1915 was illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1867–1939), who from about 1900 onwards produced some of the finest illustrations using pen, ink and watercolour. If there is one British illustrator of that time whose work consistently demonstrates that illustration can be fine art, it must be the great Arthur Rackham.

In its most memorable scene, the ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley warns the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge that he faces a grim fate, but has one chance of redemption. He’s then visited by three further spirits who show him how.

Just over twenty years later, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables seized the opportunity to tackle similar themes.

Around 1879-1882, Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy painted this work showing a well-known scene from Les Miserables, of Jean Valjean and Cosette. This shows the hero Valjean when he arrives in Montfermeil on Christmas Eve and discovers young Cosette fetching a pail of water for her abusive guardians the Thénardiers, early in the novel. He walks with her to an inn, where he orders her a meal, and learns about her mistreatment.

It’s relevant that Les Miserables was published while Victor Hugo was in exile on the island of Guernsey, after he had openly declared Emperor Napoleon III a traitor to France, following Napoleon’s seizure of power in 1851. That leads on to my final painting, with greatest relevance to the world today.

In Jacek Malczewski’s Christmas Eve in Siberia from 1892, these men have been deported from their native Poland and imprisoned in the extreme cold and remoteness of Siberia. Although there’s a steaming samovar at the end of the table, they have only had soup and a wedge of bread for their seasonal feast. Following the Polish Uprising in 1863, at least 18,000 were ‘exiled’ to Siberia, many of whom never returned.

This Christmas we should all be thinking of those who, for whatever reason, can’t spend this holiday in safety and comfort with their family.