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.

Jesters or fools appear to have originated as entertainers in ancient Rome, and were features in many of the royal courts in Europe. Among the most famous are those in the plays of William Shakespeare. In this article, I look at paintings of fools and jesters, and tomorrow those of their intellectual complements, sages and sundry wise persons.

Some of Shakespeare’s fools play significant roles in the plot, of whom the most famous must be Yoric, on whose skull Hamlet gives one of the most memorable speeches in the English language.

This was sufficient for Philip Hermogenes Calderon to paint a speculative scene of The Young Lord Hamlet in 1868, showing the prince long before the start of the play. Set in happier days before the death of Hamlet’s father, its reading is an interesting challenge. If the figure on hands and knees, wearing the standard jester’s rig, is Yoric, then presumably the young boy riding on his back is Hamlet, and the younger infant in the care of the three women on the right might be the young Ophelia.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret shows the famous scene of Hamlet and the Gravediggers (1883) as the prince is about to lament the passing of Yoric to the gravediggers, opening with the words “To be, or not to be…”.

The fool in King Lear has a lesser role, although at least he remains alive and well throughout the play. His most prominent moment is when he accompanies the enraged king out into a tempest.

Ary Scheffer’s watercolour of King Lear and the Fool from 1834 places the pair on Shakespeare’s bleak heath.

In William Dyce’s King Lear and the Fool in the Storm from about 1851, the king is having a good rant into the wind of the storm, his body language profuse. Resting with his head propped on the heels of his hands, the Fool also looks up to the heavens.

Shakespeare’s other plays feature fools and jesters who sing and entertain, like Touchstone in As You Like It.

JW Waterhouse painted his portrait in watercolour, in his undated Jester.

Daniel Maclise’s Wrestling Scene in ‘As You Like It’ from 1854 shows the wrestler Charles on the left, as Orlando on the right prepares for their contest. The two daughters, Celia and Rosalind, embrace one another in anxiety, and Touchstone is seated at the front.

John Collier’s undated painting of Touchstone and Audrey catches the jester in one of his more serious moments, as he woos the simple Audrey.

My last Shakespearean fool appears in Twelfth Night.

Walter Deverell’s Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV (1850) show Feste the clown singing to Orsino and Viola, disguised as Cesario.

A few non-theatrical fools and jesters also appear in paintings.

“Keying Up” – The Court Jester was one of William Merritt Chase’s student paintings, made in 1875 when he was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. He sent this back to his sponsors in St. Louis, Missouri, where it went on to win a medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition that year.

Georges Clairin had a reputation of being a socialite, but his King’s Fool from 1880 is unusual and great fun.

Other than the fictional Yoric, few jesters or fools have attained fame. One notable exception to this is Stańczyk, a Polish court jester who lived between about 1480-1560.

In 1917 Kazimierz Sichulski painted this Portrait of Józef Piłsudski with Wernyhora and Stańczyk in pastels. Piłsudski was a major Polish statesman who was to become Chief of State after the First World War. Stańczyk (left) here symbolises Poland’s struggle for independence. Wernyhora (right) is a legendary Cossack bard who apparently told of the fall of Poland and its subsequent rebirth as a great nation. Both Piłsudski and Wernyhora feature in contemporary paintings by Jacek Malczewski.

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.