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Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant painted Judith possibly around 1886.

Judith (sort of a character from the Old Testament and sort of not, depending on whom you ask) ought properly to be dressed in Israeli clothes from the first few centuries of the common era.

Instead, though—and appropriately given the anachronisms in the Book of Judith itself—she wears fairly modern turquerie, probably inspired by Constant’s travels.

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Henry Herbert La Thangue painted The Man with the Scythe in 1896.

As Christie’s writes, La Thangue painted many “large naturalistic scenes of rural life.” This, though, is a slight departure from his usual depictions of orchards or fields.

Here, we see another aspect of rural life, and perhaps a darker one. It is possible, without the title, to read this painting in a purely sentimental light: a girl (presumably ill, given that she sits wrapped in a shawl and leaning on a pillow) has fallen asleep as she waits for her father, who returns, scythe in hand. In that version, her mother presumably wakes her to greet him.

Given the abstraction of the title—not “A Father Returns” or “Father with His Scythe” but the somewhat distant “The Man with the Scythe”—it seems a little more sinister. The girl (again, probably ill), has died, and her mother discovers it. The man who reaches the gate with his scythe takes on symbolic meaning.

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Manuel Domínguez Sánchez painted this, The Suicide of Seneca, in 1871.

The topic is, ostensibly, classical: Seneca, a philosopher of the Stoic school, was sentenced to commit suicide for his possible collaboration against the Roman Emperor Nero. He dies, eventually, in a warm bath.

However, the image recollects paintings—particularly Jacques-Louis David’s—of the death of Jean-Paul Marat, a journalist of the French Revolution. Both the bath, a distinctive component of both deaths, and the placement of Seneca’s garments draping over the edges of his tub correspond to David’s 1793 painting.

Painted in 1871 in Spain—in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1868, in which Queen Isabella II was deposed—it seems likely that Sánchez painted his depiction of Seneca (who himself was convicted of an attempt against a ruler) with contemporary, as well as historical, revolutions in mind.

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James Northcote—a former student of Sir Joshua Reynolds’—painted Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 3, in 1790.

The work depicts a moment that productions often skip, probably for dramatic tension.

In Romeo and Juliet, between Romeo’s death and Juliet’s, Friar Laurence pops his head in. You can imagine why the interchange is frequently dropped; separating the lovers’ speeches with

“Come, I’ll dispose of thee Among a sisterhood of holy nuns”

seems, to modern ears at least, a little anticlimactic (Act V, Scene 3, lines 156–157).

Here, though, Northcote grants the moment its own power. Friar Laurence is at once judgmental and, with his two different light sources (a torch in hand and a lantern behind him), a literal beacon. Juliet is a picture of innocence, and surprising decisiveness: her face is collected, her arm extended in a gesture of dimissal.

(But Paris just looks really, really dead.)