What did we do in the evenings before the arrival of TV and radio? People read, talked to one another, played games, and made music. Many middle class homes had a piano, and many children became accomplished musicians. For this, we went into the music room. In one of the houses in which I grew up, we had a drawing-cum-music room containing a wonderful German upright piano that I practiced on daily. Here are some examples from the modest to the grand and regal.

Music features in several of Vermeer’s paintings, in The Concert (c 1663-66) more particularly than any other. Two ladies are making music, one playing a decorated harpsichord (or similar), the other singing. In the left foreground is a cello resting on its back. Tragically, on 18 March 1990 this and a dozen other works were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, MA, and it remains unrecovered.

If your home happened to be the palace at Versailles, then you could have a grander music room or two, as shown in François Flameng’s undated painting of a Concert at Versailles.

In the case of Adolph Menzel’s Concert for Flute with Frederick the Great in Sanssouci (1850-52), you could get the composer CPE Bach to accompany you on the harpsichord, and your flute teacher, Johann Joachim Quantz, to listen at the far right. This concert would have taken place in this palace near Potsdam in Germany about a century earlier, in about 1750.

The Music Room, painted by Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate in 1871 also shows a concert from the previous century. While this slightly more modest music room features a couple singing to the accompaniment of the piano, and there are musical instruments in the centre foreground, everyone else in the room is engaged in decidedly non-musical activities.

James Tissot’s Hush! from about 1875 shows a musical performance in a private residence, no doubt attended by the cream of society. Among the honoured guests at the right are two from the Asian continent, but the distinguished host is still awaited, their chair empty, and the violinist poised to begin her command performance once they are ready.

Fritz von Uhde’s Family Concert from 1881 is more typical of a musical evening in a middle class household, apart from the bedraggled crow in the foreground, who seems out of place.

Although the piano in the left foreground isn’t being played, Hanna Pauli’s group portrait of Friends (1900-07) shows an interesting group gathered in her family home. Among those present are the writer Ellen Key (1849-1926), a ‘difference’ feminist and advocate of child-centred parenting and learning, who is reading to the others.

Julius Schmid’s Schubertiade returns to the chandeliers of the past. This was painted in 1897 to celebrate the Austrian composer’s centenary, and shows him performing to a packed music room in the early years of the century.

Music rooms were also features of more compact homes.

Between 1908-26, Édouard Vuillard lived in a fifth floor apartment in Rue de Calais, Paris, overlooking what was then known as Place Vintimille, now Place Adolf-Max. In his Morning Concert, Place Vintimille from 1937-38, a trio of friends are playing for the artist in his apartment.

By that time, some music rooms featured cabinet radios and gramophones for family groups to listen to music performed by those not present.

By the late nineteenth century, the classical format of the triptych that had been developed for altarpieces, was being used to tell secular stories as well as more traditional religious ones. Some artists had abandoned the use of three hinged panels intended to stand unsupported, and set three paintings within a single frame to be hung on a wall instead. Popular layouts included a central theme with subordinate wings, and a sequence read from left to right.

Constantin Meunier’s undated Triptych of the Mine is intended as a tribute to long-suffering underground workers, and makes a parallel with triptychs showing the Crucifixion. The left wing shows their descent, the centre their ascent of Calvary, and the right their ascent to surface at the end of their working day.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Aino Myth (1891) is set in a gilt frame with quoted text from the Kalevala inset, similar to Arthur Hughes arrangement from 1856. This shows scenes from Songs 4-5 of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.

The left panel shows the first meeting between Väinämöinen, the central figure and hero of the epic, and the young Aino, Joukahainen’s sister, in the forest. The perpetually ancient Väinämöinen there asks Aino to be his wife, to her shock and anger. The girl runs back to her mother in tears, but she offers no sympathy, telling her to stop crying, and to rejoice at the offer.

Aino remains distressed at the prospect of marrying such an old man, so wonders off, and becomes lost in the forest. She comes across the shore of a strange lake, where she sees the maids of Vellamo playing in the water, as shown in the right panel. She enters the water to wash, and drowns.

In Song 5, Väinämöinen goes to fish for Aino in the lake, and catches a salmon, which he tries unsuccessfully to cut up, so the fish slips back into the water. It then changes into Aino, who mocks Väinämöinen that he may have held her in his hands, but he cannot keep her, shown in the centre panel. She then disappears, and Väinämöinen travels to Pohjola to court the Maiden there.

In 1894, Édouard Vuillard painted this large triptych of Public Gardens, where its panels form a continuous landscape view and divide its figures into three groups. At the left is a group of carers with children; in the centre is a trio of ladies, one of them cradling an infant, and at the right is an older woman sat alone wearing the black of widowhood.

Léon Frédéric’s Ages of the Worker from about 1905 is set in the crowded streets of a Belgian town. The left panel shows men engaged in manual labour, including two who are moving heavy props from a mine. In the centre, a group of young boys are enjoying an improvised meal on the pavement as young couples and a miner move around them. At the right, women are feeding and caring for their infants. I suspect that Frédéric may have intended the work to be read from right to left, rather than in the more usual direction.

Fedir Krychevskyi painted this triptych of Life in the latter half of the 1920s, and its centre panel was the most acclaimed work among paintings by Ukrainian artists shown at the Venice Biennale in 1928. From the left, its panels are titled Love, Family and Return. It blends his own distinctive approach with Art Nouveau, Klimt and mediaeval wall painting.

The Memorial was painted by Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin in 1932 as a public commission for the town of Cahors in southwest France. Its single continuous scene shows a commemoration of the dead of the First World War, centred symmetrically on the town’s war memorial.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Kazimierz Sichulski painted several large triptychs of the Hutsul peoples, including this Adoration of the Shepherds in 1938. Although modern in style, this is laid out as a traditional Nativity, with the Virgin and Child in the centre, and shepherds looking on from its wings.

Reading larger polyptychs can be a greater challenge.

Among the most remarkable is The Ghent Altarpiece painted by the van Eyck brothers and their workshop in about 1432 for Saint Bavo Cathedral in Gent, Belgium. Its twelve panels are arrayed around the central panorama of the adoration of the Lamb of God. Its upper register features an array of figures with Adam and Eve outermost, and either Christ the King or God the Father at its centre. The lower register includes a gathering set against a continuous landscape background.

Polyptychs are also common outside Europe, including in East Asia where they were popular on screens. Some were also made from groups of woodblock prints.

Kitagawa Utamaro’s (喜多川 歌麿) Girl Fishers and Bathers from 1791 shows seaside activities at Enoshima. Although composed as a triptych with a continuous motif, the same topless woman appears in each of the sheets, making the whole a multiplex narrative. It’s not clear, though, whether it was intended to be read from left to right, or in reverse.

Not content with adorning the walls of their mansions with paintings, some of the nobility covered them with tapestries, for which artists like Francisco Goya were employed to create cartoons. They were expensive, and those who still aspired to fortunes used wallpaper instead. That could be hand-painted, or more usually printed, and became sufficiently popular by the time of Oliver Cromwell in the middle of the seventeenth century to be a bone of contention with his Puritan government.

During the eighteenth century, Britain became the largest manufacturer of wallpaper in Europe, largely because it lacked the tapestry factories that had been established for other royal courts, and for the period 1712-1836 England even had a wallpaper tax.

Because paper could only be produced in relatively small sheets, early wallpaper had to be assembled from many of those. For example, Albrecht Dürer’s woodblock print of The Triumphal Arch for the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I in 1516-1518, required a total of 195 woodblocks printed onto 36 separate sheets of paper.

Wallpaper came of age and appeared on the walls of many more homes when paper could be produced in long rolls using the Fourdrinier process in the early nineteenth century.

The first of Augustus Egg’s narrative series Past and Present from 1858 shows an ordinary middle-class drawing room, with a deep-coloured heavily patterned wallpaper typical of this Victorian setting.

In Edgar Degas’ famously enigmatic Interior from 1868-69, the wallpaper is lighter and floral, matching the pattern on the lampshade, and making an association with the woman.

This exquisite wallpaper designed by Édouard Muller in 1854 is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, its five long rolls forming a trompe l’oeil of this enchanted garden from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered. Trompe l’oeils like this became popular, and have their origins in frescos painted on the walls of Roman villas in classical times. While a fresco was a costly one-off, improvements in printing made such wallpapers more widely available in the later nineteenth century.

Camille Pissarro painted a few delightful still lifes, among them this Still Life: Apples and Pears in a Round Basket from 1872, which ingeniously adds floating flowers from the wallpaper in its background.

Gustave Caillebotte’s portrait of Mademoiselle Boissière Knitting from 1877 is one of the first in which he might be said to be painting in Impressionist style. Its east Asian inspired wallpaper is typical of increasingly popular designs of that period.

Harold Gilman’s early Edwardian Interior from about 1907 shows the drawing room of his family home in the Rectory at Snargate, with the artist’s youngest sister as model. This wallpaper has a more complex design to make it appear less regular.

Wallpapers in the home of Pierre Bonnard make cameo appearances in several of his paintings, and usually feature bold stripes of colour, as seen in his famous Bowl of Milk from 1919. Although it looks informal if not spontaneous, this painting is the result of deliberate compositional work, and attention to details such as the form of the pillars on the balcony outside. In its informality is formality, in the model’s pose, the layout of the table settings, and the echoing verticals in the window and wallpaper.

When Édouard Vuillard painted his mother Madame Vuillard Sewing in 1920, he returned to a more Nabi style, and a wallpaper with a simple and bold pattern.

Further into the twentieth century, even bolder patterns appear in some of Eric Ravilious’ interiors, such as this Farmhouse Bedroom from 1939.