Ask anyone who has lived in the country and they’ll recall its idyllic moments. To end this series, I celebrate a few of those in paintings from the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.

This Ukrainian farm labourer is caught relaxing for a moment in the sun and flowers of early summer in Mykola Kuznetsov’s early In Celebration (1879-81).

The pair of ploughmen in Giovanni Segantini’s Ploughing may not have had time to study the fine mountain views near the Alpine village of Savognin, but they and the other labourers in the right distance are enjoying the fine weather.

A couple of years later, Segantini’s High Noon in the Alps (1892) catches this shepherdess enjoying a brief break in her work, in the intense summer sunshine of the high plateau.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret shows that even itinerant workers could sit together and eat to the music of a violin when living In the Forest in 1893. Behind them are two oxen, and the forest that’s currently their home.

In Poland, Teodor Axentowicz’s painting of Oberek Folk Dance in Front of a House from 1895 shows locals dancing the second most popular Polish folk dance after the polka. Most of these dancers are barefoot.

Edward Stott’s shepherd has stolen a moment of Peaceful Rest as his small flock drinks from a pond. He’s lighting a clay tobacco pipe, with his crook resting on his leg. Most of the painting uses a limited palette, with three splashes of colour standing out: the man’s face lit by the flame, the watchful sheepdog behind him, and a blue object protruding from the man’s jacket pocket.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Love in the Village shows a young couple on either side of a tumbledown fence, chatting intimately among the vegetable patches.

Idyllic moments indeed, but what happens in the country is often a far cry from the town.

Nikolai Astrup’s humorous painting of Early Courting from 1904 shows a young couple at the far left engaged in ‘clothed courting’ in the unromantic surroundings of a cowshed. He has a bottle of drink in his pocket; whether that’s to give him courage or to weaken the resistance of his girlfriend is unclear.

The couple have sought the privacy of the cowshed, out of everyone’s way, but the boyfriend appears unaware that they’re being watched by someone up in the roof. From the apparent direction of gaze of the girlfriend and the blush on her cheeks, she has just noticed the peeping tom or watchful relative. The setting is enhanced by the sunlight pouring through the far window, illuminating two rows of the back-ends of cows. The wood floor between the cows appears to be decorated with small sketches, but those are actually piles of cow dung. Courting in the country must have been a sensorily rich experience.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, as cities across Europe were growing rapidly, the Arts and Crafts Movement spread from its origins in England to bring a new wave of interest in furniture and other features of domestic interiors. This article shows some paintings of interiors by Nordic artists of that period, giving insight into changes in design taking place across the countries of northern Europe.

Prior to this, interiors in much of this region were vernacular, as shown in Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Rustic Life from 1887. A young woman sits spinning next to a bed, while an older man is repairing one of his boots in front of the open fire. There’s little in the way of furniture, and what there is has been rough-hewn and is functional.

That same year, the young Swedish artist Carl Larsson painted The Toy Corner inside the family home. His wife Karin was a talented artist who concentrated on interior design, and was responsible for most of the interiors shown in her husband’s paintings. From 1888, their family home just outside Falun in Dalarna became the centre of Larsson’s watercolours that were later published across Europe as examples that many others aspired to.

Homework (1898) shows two of the Larsson children working in the evening by the light of a kerosene lamp, amid decor designed by their mother.

Getting Ready for a Game (1901) shows Karin Larsson preparing a tray of adult refreshments, while two of their young daughters watch from behind the more appropriate teaset. From the layout of the room seen through the open door, the grown-ups are about to enjoy an evening of cards together with friends, surrounded by one of Karin’s exemplary interiors.

The Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring married Sigrid Kähler, daughter of a ceramic artist, who seems to have taken more than a passing interest in the design of their domestic interiors.

In Ring’s At Breakfast from 1898, Sigrid sits reading the ‘leftist’ daily newspaper Politiken in the sunshine.

Ring’s 1904 painting of The Artist’s Wife and Children shows Sigrid with their young son and daughter, in front of a roaring fire. In the next room is the same table from At Breakfast above, and the table in the left foreground has a carefully-polished surface allowing Ring to show subtle reflections.

Ring went on to paint more traditional homes, including this Interior with a Farmer Reading a Newspaper from 1911. This farmer, better-off than the average peasant for sure, sits reading the newspaper by the light streaming in from its windows. Roses provide a brilliant splash of colour to the far left, and there’s a clock ticking on the wall. The open doors lead through into the far end of the house, which is sparsely furnished by heavy wooden items like a wardrobe and a chest.

Although life in small villages in the fjords of Norway was more rustic, there was still scope for a little design flair. Nikolai Astrup’s Interior Still Life: Living Room at Sandalstrand from about 1921 includes a tapestry hanging in the corner, a painting on the wall, potted plants, a bowl of fruit, and an articulated wooden figure leaning against the pitcher of milk.

Until relatively recently, Icelandic society had remained strongly traditional, and homes in its capital Reykjavik were decorated in older style. Þórarinn’s glimpse into The Artist’s Home (1924) shows this well.

After death, most of us will end up in a coffin, sometimes known euphemistically as a casket. Despite their widespread use, they seldom appear in paintings, perhaps because they obscure the body. Although there’s no shortage of deaths in classical myth and legend, I’ve been unable to find any conventional narrative painting that includes a coffin. There is, though, one remarkable history painting that does.

This is Francisco Pradilla’s painting of Doña Juana “la Loca” – Juana or Joanna the Mad – from 1877, which won the Medal of Honour at the National Exhibition in Spain, went on to the Exposition Universel in Paris, and won further acclaim in Berlin.

Queen Joanna of Castile, or Juana the Mad, brought about the union of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, forming the basis of modern Spain. She married Philip the Handsome in 1496, shortly before her seventeenth birthday. He was crowned king of Castile in 1506, and was the first of the Habsburg monarchs in Spain. He died suddenly later that year, probably from typhoid fever, and Juana became mentally ill, refusing to let Philip’s body be buried. This is the basis of Pradilla’s painting, where Juana is shown in the nun’s habit she would have worn when she was eventually secreted into a convent. When her father, Ferdinand II, died in 1516, Juana inherited Aragon, and Spain was ruled under the personal union of her son Charles I, who was also elected Holy Roman Emperor.

Coffins do appear more in symbolic roles.

In 1923-24, Albin Egger-Lienz painted a thoroughly modern account of the Resurrection of Christ. His finished painting includes contemporary peasants, and the risen Christ standing in his own coffin.

They also appear in Frederic, Lord Leighton’s unusual And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It (1892), whose title is a quotation from the Book of Revelation:
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
(Revelation Chapter 20, verse 13.)

Considered to be one of his most dramatic paintings, it was initially intended to decorate Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, but was rejected as unsuitable. It was then commissioned at reduced size by Henry Tate for his new gallery of British art, now The Tate Gallery in London.

Unlike much of the fearsome imagery of the Second Coming described in the book of Revelation, this is essentially an optimistic scene, being the resurrection and spiritual salvation of those who have died at sea, an all too common fate around the British coast. A central family group shows stages of awakening: the man has been fully awakened, his son is just starting to breathe but still white, and his wife still bears the pale green hue of the dead.

Around them, others are likewise being awoken from their coffins, presumably from burial at sea, or from the water itself. Leighton’s tones and colours refer to Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819), by far the most famous painting of shipwreck and death at sea, with which Leighton was very familiar. There are also references to Michelangelo’s Entombment (1500-1), in the National Gallery and a favourite of Leighton’s at the time.

This third version of Arnold Böcklin’s famous Island of the Dead was painted in 1883 for his dealer. As with others he painted, this shows a coffin being brought by boat to the island for interment.

The few other paintings of coffins show them in more ordinary funerals.

At the end of his training in Munich, Teodor Axentowicz paid his first visit to the lands of the Hutsul people, in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. His oil painting of a Hutsul Funeral from 1882 shows the Hutsul in the rigours of winter, the coffin being towed on a sledge behind a cart, and the mourners clutching candles as they make their way through the snow to the stave church in the distance.

Jakub Schikaneder’s finished version of The Sad Way from 1886 shows a single weary horse drawing the cart bearing a coffin. The woman, presumably a widow before her time, stares emptily at the rutted mud track, as a man walks beside them. In the background is the floodplain of a river in full flood. It appears to be in the late autumn, with the last of the brown leaves remaining on the trees. Schikaneder’s world is barren, bleak, and forlorn.

In his village in Norway, Nikolai Astrup recorded the public rites of the community, as in his Funeral Day in Jølster (before 1908). With the grandeur of the hills behind, a small party escorts the coffin of one of the villagers. The artist’s father, the pastor, leads the procession to the small churchyard.

Perhaps the most famous painting of a burial in European art is that below, Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1849-50).

Courbet’s monumental Burial at Ornans (1849-50), shows in remarkably unemotional and objective terms the funeral of the artist’s great uncle in this small provincial town. The event took place in September 1848, but the painting gives the impression that it is a faithful record.

Courbet actually painted the work entirely in the studio, using those who were present as models. It shows a moment that could only have existed in the artist’s memory: like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, it doesn’t necessarily represent an image that ever existed in reality. But it has been carefully researched, imagined, composed, and painted to give the impression of accuracy and objectivity, rather than some Romantic fantasy. Another feature it has in common is that its most significant object, the coffin, is almost obscured here by the bearers.

Finally, there’s one painting that explores one of the great fears of the nineteenth century, that of being presumed dead and being buried alive.

After his mother’s death, Antoine Wiertz became progressively more obsessed with death. His Premature Burial (1854) visits this not uncommon dread of the nineteenth century: that of being presumed dead, buried, and then recovering to find yourself in a coffin. This did happen, particularly during cholera epidemics, as indicated by the lettering on the opening coffin. The profound shock resulting from choleric dehydration could make the pulse and breathing so feeble as to escape detection; with hundreds or thousands of dead, many were dumped hurriedly into mass-produced coffins and so into mass graves. And a very few managed to survive, leading to coffins being designed with bells that could be rung by a recovered occupant. Wiertz’s victim is left with the nightmare scenario of trying to make it back to the land of the living.

Under the academies that dominated painting as an art during the seventeenth and subsequent centuries, paintings were distinguished in genres. These consisted of history, portraits, genre (scenes of everyday life), landscapes, animals and still life. These gave rise to a twisted system of aesthetics that assigned greater artistic merit to a formulaic depiction of classical myth, than any landscape painting. The established genres were constraints that were quickly outgrown, as I’m going to examine in this new series looking at paintings of interiors.

Painting the inside of a house first flourished during the Dutch Golden Age, as a novel genre to appeal to collectors. Initially, most included some figures and were conveniently classed as genre works, but their object of interest increasingly lay in the room and its furnishings, as a still life on a grander scale.

Three Figures Conversing in an Interior is one of Gerard ter Borch’s narrative interiors, more popularly known as Paternal Admonition (c 1653-55). Standing with her back to us, wearing a plush going-out dress, is the daughter. To her left is a table, on which there is a small reading stand with books, almost certainly including a Bible.

Her parents are young, and they too are fashionably dressed. Her mother appears to be drinking from a glass, but her father is at the very least cautioning his daughter, if not giving her a thorough dressing-down. He wears a sword at his side. Behind them is a large bed, and to the right the family dog looks on from the gloom.

Interiors reached their height in the few brilliant paintings of Jan Vermeer.

Vermeer’s better-lit Young Woman with a Water Pitcher from about 1662-64 is a good example of this change in emphasis. The viewer’s attention is diverted from this anonymous young woman engaged in mundane activity, to her surroundings, the open chest on the table, the map on the wall behind her, and the play of the light coming in through the window.

Genre and interiors went into decline, before becoming more popular again in the nineteenth century, particularly in works aimed more at the less affluent.

The middle classes were able to indulge in a few paintings and framed prints of their own, although most would have been family portraits rather than anything of greater aesthetic or cultural value. Matthäus Kern’s watercolour showing A Study Interior at St. Polten (1837) gives an idea of what might have been expected among the middle class, perhaps.

Narrative painting started to turn away from classical themes, and became framed around open-ended narrative and ‘problem pictures’ to challenge their reading.

Edgar Degas’ Interior (1868-9), also known as The Rape, appears strongly narrative, but has so far defied all attempts to produce a reading consistent with its details. A man and a woman are in a bedroom together. She is at the left, partly kneeling down, facing to the left, and partially (un)dressed. He is at the right, fully dressed in street clothes, standing in front of the door, with his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.

The woman’s outer clothing is placed at the foot of the bed, and her corset has been hurriedly or carelessly cast onto the floor beside the bed. She clearly arrived in the room before the man, removed her outer clothing, and at some stage started to undress further, halting when she was down to her shift or chemise. Alternatively, she may have undressed completely, and at this moment have dressed again as far as her chemise.

Just behind the woman is a small occasional table, on which there is a table-lamp and a small open suitcase. Some of the contents of the suitcase rest over its edge. In front of it, on the table top, is a small pair of scissors and other items from a small clothes repair kit or ‘housewife’. There’s a wealth of detail that can fuel many different accounts of what is going on in this small room.

Interiors became sufficiently established by the late nineteenth century that they were widely exhibited.

Anna Alma-Tadema’s small watercolour of The Drawing Room, Townshend House, painted in 1885, demonstrates her skills at depicting surface light and texture. This painting was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893, a remarkable achievement for someone who was only eighteen at the time that it was painted.

Interiors became popular among those in the avant garde, including Neo-Impressionists like Maximilien Luce.

Morning, Interior (1890) is one of Luce’s best-known Divisionist paintings from the late nineteenth century. Although it adheres to the technique of applying small marks of contrasting colours to build the image, Luce’s marks are less mechanical than those seen, for example, in Seurat’s paintings. In places they become more gestural and varied, particularly in highlights.

Nordic art adopted the interior with enthusiasm, and the skills of some of its finest painters.

Harriet Backer’s Gamlestua på Kolbotn (Old Living Room at Kolbotn) from 1896 is an intimate view of a friends’ living room on their farm in Østerdalen, Norway. Hulda and Arne Garborg are seen, sat at the table, with Arne holding his fiddle. Behind them are paintings, among them two landscapes painted by Backer’s friend Kitty Kielland.

Some came to specialise in distinctive interiors, such as the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. His Room in the Artist’s Home in Strandgade, Copenhagen, with the Artist’s Wife from 1901 is typical of his explorations of light in rooms that effectively became large still lifes.

Thorvald Boecks bibliotek (Thorvald Boeck’s Library) (1902) is one of Backer’s few interiors that’s devoid of people, here replaced by books from floor to ceiling. The intricate detail of their many spines, furniture, and other decorations contrasts markedly with the bare floorboards in the foreground.

In France, the former Nabi artist Félix Vallotton painted a series of enigmatic interiors in the early years of the twentieth century.

His Interior with the Back of a Woman in Red from 1903 develops the framing effect of multiple sets of doors, drawing the eye deeper towards the distant bedroom. The woman wearing a red dress looks away, her skirts swept back as if she has been moving towards the three steps dividing the space into foreground and background. There are tantalising glimpses of detail on the way: discarded fabric on a settee, clothing on a chair in the next room, and half of a double bed with a bedside lamp in the distance.

In Britain, members of the Camden Town Group led by Walter Sickert headed in a different direction.

Alongside others in the group, Spencer Gore painted mundane domestic interiors such as The Gas Cooker (1913), showing his wife Mollie in the tiny kitchen of their flat in Houghton Place in London.

In Norway, Nikolai Astrup, a former pupil of Harriet Backer, provided the occasional peek into his domestic life. Interior Still Life: Living Room at Sandalstrand (c 1921) shows his family home, with a tapestry hanging in the corner, an unidentified painting on the wall, potted plants, a bowl of fruit, and an articulated wooden figure leaning against a pitcher of milk.

I hope these paintings have whetted your appetite for the rest of this series, which starts next week with the Dutch Golden Age.