The third and final part of this survey of courtroom sketching compares the French and Russian traditions. Its practical value is in showing that a drawing from court did not simply replace a banned photograph: it could be a caricature, a report, or a way to explain the proceedings themselves.
The genre is usually associated with the United States and Great Britain, where artists sketch hearings because of restrictions on photography. But the French tradition took shape earlier, and courtroom works also appeared in the Russian Empire and the USSR—though they did not form an equally popular and enduring school. The difference here is not just in drawing technique: the audience, the purpose of the image, and what society wanted to see in court all changed.
French caricature as commentary on justice
One of the key figures in the French tradition was Honoré Daumier. As a child, he worked as a messenger for a lawyer, later studied academic drawing, and became fascinated by caricature. Daumier spent six months in prison for depicting a ruler; later, he was recognized as one of the classics of French painting and caricature.
Daumier’s best-known series was “The Lawyers.” In it, he showed unequal access to justice, opaque decision-making, the indifference of judges and lawyers who turned hearings into a performance. This was not a hearing transcript, but a critical view of an institution and its participants. Paradoxically, Paris lawyers disliked his “stupid little pictures,” yet a Daumier caricature could also be a sign that a lawyer had become well known in professional circles.
In France, courts became more public after the revolution and attracted broad attention. People could attend seven days a week, and trials rivaled theatrical performances in popularity. Cases and events included disputes about equality, political conflicts, and public executions, which were abolished only in 1939. A dedicated newspaper, La Gazette de Tribunaux, covered the courts and regularly reported on trials.
As literacy spread in the late nineteenth century, the press gained a new audience. Publications attracted readers with sensational headlines, lurid details, and caricatures that made sense without lengthy explanations. In this environment, a courtroom image could inform and entertain at the same time. The artist’s hand-drawn work was part of the media machinery: the court provided the story, and the drawing helped deliver it to the reader quickly.
The French tradition later expanded to include comics about trials. One example is the case of Yvan Colonna, accused of murdering the prefect of Corsica. After a five-year search, he was found, and in 2007 the trial took place, drawing considerable attention because the case was connected to the political debate over Corsican independence. The hearings were followed by caricaturist and illustrator Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, and storyboard artist Dominique Paganelli.
Neither artist had a legal education or had worked in courts before. Their position as outside observers became part of the concept: the comic conveyed not only the sequence of events, but also how a person makes sense of the procedures. Arrows, notes, and explanations helped readers understand how witnesses testify, how evidence is introduced into a case, and what role the court clerk plays. Procedural steps that are easy to collapse into one long list in a dry description became the actions of specific people on the page.
François Boucq, an artist for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, took a different approach. In January 2015, terrorist attacks in Paris killed 17 people; one of the attacks targeted the magazine’s editorial office. In 2020, the trial of the attackers’ accomplices began—including weapons suppliers, ideologues, and informants. Boucq sketched every day of the hearings, but gave up his usual light style and caricature elements, explaining that this was an ethical choice and that the case had to be treated with respect.
His work appeared in two formats: the chronological comic “January 2015” and a separate series of illustrations for print. The boundaries of the genre are especially clear here: the artist remains a reporter with a pencil, but changes his tone to suit the subject. A light style is not a universal tool, and in this case deliberately limiting it was part of the author’s decision.
The Russian experience: from reform to Nuremberg
In the Russian Empire, interest in the courts grew after the reform of 1864. It proclaimed the goal of creating justice that was accessible to people and equal for everyone before the law. The new trials became a notable social phenomenon: the adversarial model, the development of the prosecution and the legal profession, and prominent participants—including lawyer Fyodor Plevako and prosecutor Anatoly Koni—attracted public attention.
However, expectations of the reform did not always match the way the system worked. The survey’s author describes the courts both as a tool of economic pressure on peasants and as institutions whose independence was undermined by political crises. The press, caricatures, novels, and paintings reflected these contradictions. In “Resurrection,” Leo Tolstoy’s last novel, there is a sense of disappointment that the idea of a just court was never realized. After the novel was published, one of the judges responded with an open letter, reproaching the writer for not knowing a judge’s day-to-day life: lack of funding, an overloaded caseload, and attempts to find the truth in difficult circumstances.
Paintings about the courts are not the same as sketches made during hearings, but they show how the theme of justice entered art. Examples include Alexander Volkov’s work “In Court” from 1867, where a peasant uses the sign of the cross as evidence, and Konstantin Savitsky’s painting “Waiting for the Court’s Verdict,” created after the artist’s experience as a juror. It depicts the defendant’s female relatives waiting for the judges’ decision in the deliberation room.
Among actual courtroom sketches is Vladimir Kadulin’s drawing from the Beilis trial in Kyiv in 1913. Less than a decade ago, it was mistakenly linked to the Plevako case, but a check of the signature established who made it. In the Beilis trial, the defendant’s Jewish origin was used to accuse him of ritual murder, although, according to the article, there was no evidence of his guilt. Kadulin’s drawing captures the moment when Maze, a rabbi and historian of Jewish culture, testified in court, explaining the baselessness of claims about the ritual use of children’s blood.
The newspaper Iskra more often depicted courts through caricature. The artist A. I. Lebedev drew on the character types he had seen in the courtroom and added captions to explain the scene. This is close to French courtroom caricature: specific observations were turned into a generalized image. Caricature did not replace a full report on the case, but gave readers a brief comment on what was happening.
Kukryniksy in Nuremberg
In the Soviet period, the work of Kukryniksy became an important example of courtroom sketching. During the Great Patriotic War, the group was among the artists of TASS Windows, a series of posters that continued the tradition of ROSTA Windows of Satire. Unlike their predecessors, whose posters also taught everyday and workplace rules, TASS Windows covered military exploits and Red Army victories, and mocked the enemy. The artists worked intensely, and because of blackout precautions they could not open the studio windows at night; the article mentions that they sometimes lost consciousness from intoxication caused by paints and solvents.
In 1945, Kukryniksy were sent to Nuremberg to draw the trial of the leaders of the Third Reich. Before the trip, the artists, who held the rank of major, were promoted to colonels: according to the article, this was meant to ensure they had the proper status. At first, they were to work at the back of the courtroom or in the balconies alongside journalists. Later, the American court commandant, having seen the caricature “The Last Digit” in the newspaper Pravda, allowed them to draw closer to the tribunal table.
This allowed the artists to observe the defendants, among them Speer, Keitel, and Göring. Göring recognized one of the artists, Sokolov, known to Soviet audiences for his wartime work. Kukryniksy created caricatures for Krokodil and Pravda, and the separate work “The Accusation, Nuremberg Trial” is dated 1967. Illustrator Nikolai Zhukov was also sketching the trial.
In modern Russia, courtroom sketching remains a niche genre, according to the survey’s author. Among notable examples, he names Pavel Shevelev’s “Drawings from the Case,” devoted to the Yukos case: the artist came to the trial after the mother of one of the accused said that nobody went there. The genre’s current role, as described in the article, has shifted from simply illustrating hearings to conveying emotions and creating space for discussion. A court procedure can be recounted in words, but a sketch also captures how it was seen by an observer present in the courtroom.
In one historical episode, the artists had to be given the rank of colonel to get them admitted to the right spot in the courtroom. That is a fairly elaborate way to arrange access for a pencil-and-paper report.
