Few modern Christmas traditions have their origin in Gospel accounts of the Nativity. Read those, and you’ll see no mention of the ox and ass that appear inside the shed depicted widely over much the last 1,600 years. Although literary sources for them don’t appear until the eighth century, they started to feature in visual art in about 400 CE, and became frequent in miniatures in manuscripts from the tenth century onwards.

It’s probably Duccio’s Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel from 1308-11 that formed the prototype for paintings over the following centuries, with its humble shed set into rock, the Holy Family, attendant ox, ass and sheep, shepherds and angels. This triptych was installed at the high altar in the cathedral of Siena, Italy, on 30 June 1311, and remained there for nearly two centuries, only being removed in 1506.

By the dawn of the nineteenth century, artists like William Blake were departing from that well-worn tradition.

By comparison, Blake’s Nativity from 1799-1800 is extraordinary. On the left, Joseph supports the Virgin Mary, who appears to have fainted. Jesus has somehow sprung from her womb, and hovers in mid-air, arms outstretched as if preparing for crucifixion. On the right, Mary’s older cousin Elisabeth greets the infant with her own son John the Baptist on her lap. Although most unconventional, at the top right Blake still includes the familiar oxen, and a cross or star burns bright through the window at the top.

Jean-Léon Gérôme was one of the first to set the traditional Nativity scene inside a different context, as a reminder of the events that were taking place at the eastern end of the Mediterranean during the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. In The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ (c 1852-54), the emperor sits on his throne, overseeing a huge gathering of people from all over his empire. Grouped in the foreground in a quotation from a conventional nativity is the Holy Family, whose infant son was to transform the Roman Empire in the centuries to come.

Later in the nineteenth century, progressive artists interpreted the traditions amid more contemporary surroundings.

Fritz von Uhde’s Sacred Night triptych, painted in 1888-89, shows three scenes from his contemporary recasting. In the centre is a modern interpretation of the classic Virgin Mary and Child, with the adoration of the magi on the left, and a delightful angelic choir singing amid the barn’s rafters on the right.

Uhde’s undated Christmas Night concentrates on the Nativity, in another atmospheric interpretation of the Holy Family of Joseph, the infant Christ, and the Virgin Mary in their improvised accommodation in Bethlehem.

Maurice Denis also transcribed several Biblical narratives into more recent settings. One of his most impressive is this thoroughly modern Nativity from 1894, where the birth of Jesus takes place in a contemporary French town. However, the artist couldn’t omit the traditional ox and ass behind the Holy Family, and the guiding star still burns bright in the sky.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s watercolour of The Nativity is another contemporary interpretation of the cowshed, singular in the dress of the mother attending to her infant. Joseph is absent, though, as is the traditional ass or donkey.

Joseph Stella’s Crèche from 1929-33 is an ingenious framing. At its centre is the Nativity crib so often shown at Christmas, with an audience who might have been drawn from the artist’s home city in Italy, playing traditional bagpipes in homage.

That conveniently leads us to tomorrow’s final article covering paintings of the Christmas festival. Until then, I wish you a very merry Christmas!

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.