Some of our most popular furniture is primarily intended for storage and display. This article looks at paintings of cupboards, and their specialist relatives sideboards and (Welsh) dressers. Although of ancient origins, cupboards reached a peak during the Dutch Golden Age, when the middle classes became highly acquisitive. Dressers have been traditional in some areas, including Wales, and Brittany in France, while sideboards came of age in the nineteenth century dining room.

The cupboard standing behind Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Laundress (1761) was commonplace in many European households, and is here in the dilapidated servants’ area, probably in a cellar, where this provocative and flirtaceous young maid is washing the household linen. This was painted for Greuze’s patron, Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, when the artist was enjoying great success at the Salon. His reputation faded after 1780, and he lost everything in the French Revolution, dying a pauper.

Edward Burne-Jones’ Cinderella from 1863 shows her reverted to her plain clothes after the ball, but still wearing one (the left) glass slipper. She is seen in a scullery or similar area, with a dull, patched, and grubby working dress and apron. Behind her is a densely packed display of blue crockery in the upper section of a large dresser.

A decade later in New York, the American genre artist Eastman Johnson painted an open narrative work that only makes any sense when you know its title of Not at Home (c 1873). This apparently shows the interior of the artist’s home, where there’s a small dresser in the parlour with a more modest display of plates and mementos.

Briton Rivière’s Cupboard Love, from 1881, is a visual and verbal pun. The phrase refers to affection in return for gain, shown well in the two dogs whose interest lies in the food which the young woman is about to produce from the heavy wooden cupboard behind them.

William Merritt Chase’s many paintings of his studio became something of a shop window for prospective customers. In his Studio Interior from about 1882, a fashionably dressed young woman is glancing through a huge bound collation of Chase’s work, sat by a grand carved wooden sideboard, decorated with almost outlandish objects including a model ship, a lute, and sundry objets d’art.

Some cupboards have highly specialised roles, such as that in Joaquín Sorolla’s Kissing the Relic from 1893. At the end of Mass in the church of Saint Paul in Valencia, close to Sorolla’s childhood home, the congregation have been invited to kiss a reliquary containing an alleged relic of a revered saint, drawn from the cupboard behind the priest.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s wife Sigrid sits reading the newspaper Politiken At Breakfast (1898), with a modern sideboard behind her. This houses a mixture of tableware and personal mementos rather than serving as a buffet.

Further north in Sweden, Carl Larsson’s wife Karin is Getting Ready for a Game (1901) as she prepares a tray of refreshments in her dining room. At the left is a tall glass-fronted display cabinet containing glassware, while at the right is a simple sideboard with separate shelving to display decorated crockery.

Free-standing cupboards are nothing compared to those you can walk into.

Félix Vallotton’s Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901) uses its gloomy repoussoir to frame a woman crouching low over its contents. On the shelves above her are thick bundles of papers, such as those used in law and public administration.

A couple of years later, in his Interior, Woman in Blue Searching in a Cupboard (1903), Vallotton painted his wife Gabrielle from behind as she stood searching in a free-standing cupboard of books.

Elizabeth Nourse’s painting of a Breton Interior from about 1907 shows a well-stocked dresser beside this young girl’s bed. As dressers were unusual in bedrooms, this combination suggests the family home is very cramped, and the child has to sleep in the same room as the family eats.

Growing plants indoors is an ancient tradition, but it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that it became popular among the middle classes. While some were grown for their flowers, foliage plants became common, and in the later part of the century Aspidistra elatior became so widespread in Britain that it was a symbol of dull middle-class respectability and the bourgeoisie.

The potted houseplants straggling up for light from the window in John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Thoughts of the Past (1859) are anything but respectable, though. Here they form part of the stereotype of one of London’s many prostitutes.

In 1887, the young Swedish artist Carl Larsson painted The Toy Corner inside his 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. At the left is a collection of plants in red earthenware pots.

At about the same time, Paul Signac pictured the bourgeoisie at table in La salle à manger, variously known as Breakfast or The Dining Room from 1886-87, perhaps his first major Neo-Impressionist painting. The man seen in profile with his cigar is Signac’s grandfather Jules, and the woman drinking coffee may be Signac’s mother. This is thoroughly middle class, with its uniformed maid, a spotless tablecloth, plush curtains and a potted plant in the window.

Sunday, which Signac started in October 1888 and completed in March 1890, is perhaps the best-known of his interiors, and continues their theme of the humdrum life of the bourgeoisie. Its static, stultified composition and atmosphere are intentional, and pervade its every detail down to the potted palms at the left.

Harriet Backer’s Woman Sewing (1890) shows a woman (a wife in the Norwegian title) sat at her sewing. This appears to have been a quick oil sketch, with its gestural depictions of potted plants, table, and chair.

The potted plants in Anna Ancher’s Fisherman’s Wife Sewing (1890) are in flower, and shown in their shadows cast on the wall by the sunlight pouring through a window to the left.

In 1895, Christian Krohg painted one of his more enigmatic works, a throwback to his social narratives, and something of a ‘problem painting’: Eyewitnesses. It is nighttime in a living room. Two fishermen stand in front of a door. Still wearing their soaked and soiled oilskins, they appear to have entered the room straight after coming ashore from the sea. One stares in shock towards the viewer, the other looks down and away. Both appear full of unease, silent and immobile.

At the right, a young woman is standing, leaning forward towards the men, as if listening to them. She looks anxious, with her hands clasped in front of her chest. Behind her an oil lamp burns brightly, there are the leaves of a large potted plant, and a couple of paintings on the wall behind a large blue settee.

In another world three years later, the Danish painter Laurits Andersen Ring’s wife Sigrid sits reading the ‘leftist’ daily newspaper Politiken At Breakfast in 1898. The furniture is modern, designed rather than thrown together, and colour-coordinated. By the window on the right is a small stack of potted plants enjoying the light.

Thorvald Boecks bibliotek (Thorvald Boeck’s Library) (1902) is one of Harriet Backer’s few interiors that is devoid of people, here replaced by books from floor to ceiling. Alongside the intricate detail of their many spines, furniture, and other decorations is a high potted plant at the left.

The windowsills in Nikolai Astrup’s Interior Still Life: Living Room at Sandalstrand are full of plants enjoying the sheltered climate indoors.

Further north still, homes in Iceland’s capital Reykjavik had room for ample foliage, as shown in Þórarinn Þorláksson’s view of The Artist’s Home in 1924.

The aspidistra is still flying in domestic interiors today.