Have yourself a merry little Christmas

From gleaming presents to inebriating parties, discover five artists' interpretations of the festive season

- Carla Passino

LOOK back down the artistic centuries and Christmas is the Nativity, tender and maternal, bathed in the lustrous light that surges from the Child, or perhaps the Adoration of the Magi, golden and solemn, and of Shepherds, simple men caught by the greatness of the moment. Every now and again, however, painters captured secular scenes of Yuletide traditions, whether it's glorious knees-ups (best in 17th-century Flanders) or Christmas carols (at their most resplendent with the pre-Raphaelites).

All I want for Christmas

Christmas Morning (1916) by Henry Mosler (1841-1920)

IT’S intriguing that one of the most touching pictures of Christmas was painted by an artist of Jewish origin. Henry Mosler was born in Troplowitz, in what today is Poland, in 1841 and was eight when his family moved to America, part of a wave of German Jewish immigrants fleeing the political turmoil of their native land. Despite not being universally appreciated—'we wish that Mr. Mosler could have had something to say worth saying,' wrote the New York Tribune after his solo exhibition of 1885—he had a talent for capturing the drama in seemingly ordinary genre scenes. This is a skill he had honed when painting European peasant scenes between 1874 and 1894—his Le Retour, a version of the tale of the Prodigal Son in a Breton setting, was the first-ever work by an American artist to enter France's governmental collection at the Musée de Luxembourg. Returning to America with a Legion d'Honneur to his name, he became best known for the pictures of his adopted country's colonial past, but also continued to make genre paintings. Christmas Morning, also called The Christmas Tree, which dates from 1916, captures the magic anticipation of the day, when the children, fresh out of bed, spy the presents gleaming under the tree—before mayhem begins.

Oh come, all ye faithful