The Wedding Register

Soft light filters through a latticed window into a room paneled in dark wood.

Dressed in a white bridal gown, the bride leans forward slightly toward the table.

With one silk glove removed, she holds a quill pen in her hand.

The groom, in a dark suit holding his top hat, watches with a deeply pensive gaze as his bride-to-be signs.

Opposite them sit a bespectacled official and a flower girl holding a large bouquet.

Everyone holds their breath, their eyes fixed on the nib of the pen gliding across the paper.

Unveiled in 1920, this painting is often assumed to depict a contemporary wedding of that period.

Others have spoken of it as a personal record, with the painter's own daughter posing as the model.

Yet that is not quite the case.

In truth, it is an "imagined past" from a century earlier, meticulously staged within the artist's studio.

The painter was Edmund Blair Leighton.

By 1920, he was in his late sixties.

The era was one in which the upheaval of the First World War had only just subsided.

Following the catastrophic losses of the war, the traditional family order of British society had been profoundly shaken.

In the art world, modern movements such as Cubism and abstraction were rapidly gaining ground.

His style of classical narrative painting, rooted in the Victorian era, was sometimes met with cold indifference by avant-garde critics as mere nostalgia for a bygone age.