19th-century allegorical paintings

Dominique Antoine Jean-Baptiste Magaud (4 August 1817, Marseille - 23 December 1899, Marseille) was a French painter, muralist and art school director.

Prometheus Bound is an 1847 oil painting by American artist Thomas Cole. Prometheus Bound is one of Cole's largest paintings, and like his other major works of the 1840s it was not the result of a commission. It draws from the ancient Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. In the painting, Prometheus is chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus in Scythia. Zeus has punished him for endowing humans with life, knowledge, and specifically for giving humans fire. Each day a raptor comes to feed on Prometheus's liver, which regrows between visits, making Zeus's punishment even more cruel.

The Voyage of Life is a series of four paintings created by the American artist Thomas Cole in 1840 and reproduced with minor alterations in 1842, representing an allegory of the four stages of human life. The paintings, Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age, depict a voyager who travels in a boat on a river through the mid-19th-century American wilderness. In each painting the voyager rides the boat on the River of Life accompanied by a guardian angel. The landscape, each reflecting one of the four seasons of the year, plays a major role in conveying the story. With each installment the boat's direction of travel is reversed from the previous picture. In childhood, the infant glides from a dark cave into a rich, green landscape. As a youth, the boy takes control of the boat and aims for a shining castle in the sky. In manhood, the adult relies on prayer and religious faith to sustain him through rough waters and a threatening landscape. Finally, the man becomes old and the angel guides him to heaven across the waters of eternity.

The Republic, known in French as La République, is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French artist Honoré Daumier, created in 1848. It is a sketch made for a contest that would decide an official painting destined to represent the French Second Republic. It is held at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

The Wheel of Fortune is an oil painting on canvas by the British Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, made from 1875 to 1883. The painting combines classical and medieval themes to present an allegory of the vagaries of life, a vanitas, with individual lives elevated or cast down as the wheel of fortune turns. Burne-Jones commented: "My wheel of Fortune is a true-to-life image; it comes to fetch each of us in turn, then it crushes us." The prime version has been in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris since 1980.

A Little Coaxing (French: Câlinerie) is an oil painting by the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, painted and completed in 1890, and now owned by a private collector.

The Virgin of the Lilies (French: La Vierge au lys), also known as The Madonna of the Lilies, is an 1899 oil painting by the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, now owned by a private owner. Its dimensions are 27 × 18.5 cm.

Dawn (French: L'Aurore), also known as the Girl with a Lily, is an oil-on-canvas painting created in 1881 by the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau. It was one of his most notable works. Its dimensions are 214.9 × 107 cm.

From Darkness, the Light (Hungarian: Borura derü!) or Allegory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Hungarian: A Magyar Tudományos Akadémia allegóriája) is a monumental painting by Johann Ender in the Art Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. It is also the official symbol of the institution, the main motif constituting its logo.

Mammon, originally exhibited as Mammon. Dedicated to his Worshippers, is an 1885 oil painting by English artist George Frederic Watts, currently in Tate Britain. One of a number of paintings by Watts in this period on the theme of the corrupting influence of wealth, Mammon shows a scene from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in which Mammon, the embodiment of greed, crushes the weak through his indifference to their plight. This reflected Watts's belief that wealth was taking the place of religion in modern society, and that this worship of riches was leading to social deterioration. The painting was one of a group of works Watts donated to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in late 1886, and in 1897 it was one of 17 Watts paintings transferred to the newly created Tate Gallery. Although rarely exhibited outside the Tate Gallery, the popularity of reproductions made Mammon one of Watts's better known paintings.