In the days before contraception and family planning, when infant and child mortality were very high, many families had many babies and younger children, even though few would be expected to survive to have their own children. Households that could afford the space were able to dedicate rooms to the children, and sometimes their sheer number required it. This week’s paintings of interiors afford a glimpse at those central to the world of the child.

In the country, local schools were often held in a dedicated room in or adjacent to the teacher’s house, as seen in this undated painting by one of Eduard Ritter’s circle. Brave Girls, Bad Boys, School Class in Tyrol was probably painted between 1835-1849, during the reign of Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria who is shown in one of its portraits. The children are enjoying a rich range of fruit, and there’s no shortage of paper, even if some is being used to make hats rather than for writing. Its elderly schoolmaster looks delightfully benign, and the stem on his smoking pipe is the longest I have ever seen.

Pierre Olivier Joseph Coomans’ Children most probably dates from the late 1860s, with the artist’s two daughters Diana (1861-1952) and Héva (1860-1939) at play in the dark corner of a room. One is taking a swing at her sister’s articulated wooden doll in an apparent bid to continue dismembering it, the other is seated on an animal skin. Coomans’ daughters and a son all became successful painters.

Giuseppe Sciuti’s marvellous depiction of The Joys of the Good Mother, also known as The Geography Lesson, from 1877, shows three children from a close-knit family. The baby is feeding at mother’s breast, while the oldest is learning to read with her, and (with the assistance of a nurse in traditional dress) the middle child is learning about their country, Italy.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema and his wife Laura Theresa were both accomplished painters, and took delight in painting their two daughters from his first marriage, Anna (1864-1940) who also became a fine painter, and Laurense (1865-1940) who was a prolific novelist and poet.

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s early painting of The Tea Party shows her step-daughter Laurense playing peacefully with her dolls in a corner of the girls’ room. Its walls are decorated with her drawings, and a comic-like story that may have been drawn by her step-mother.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s double portrait This is Our Corner from 1873 shows Anna in front of Laurense in their bedroom.

William Merritt Chase was also devoted to his family, and painted his children frequently as they grew up. However, if his Children Playing Parlor Croquet is correctly dated to about 1888, it must show the daughters of others. These two girls have taken over a room to play the indoor version of this game, which was popular at the time.

In 1889, Fritz von Uhde and his family were living in an apartment in the city of Munich, Germany, that was large enough to provide their three young daughters with The Nursery. The woman seen knitting at the right is likely to be a nanny or relative, as the artist’s wife had died three years earlier.

Helen Allingham’s undated In the Nursery shows a young woman employed as a nurse to a middle-class family, in their dedicated nursery. The fire has a guard, which would have been unusual in rooms used by adults. On the mantelpiece are what appear to be fans, probably part of the Japonisme that swept Europe and America during the late nineteenth century. Rocking chairs remain popular for helping infants and young children to sleep, of course.

It’s not clear whether the rather barren room shown in Georgios Jakobides’ Children’s Concert from 1894 is dedicated to these children. Given the cacophony they’re making with their musical instruments, it seems unlikely that any adult would want to be within earshot of them.

In architecture, a frieze is a section of a building above the columns or walls and below the roof, commonly the location of decorative sculpture or a bas-relief.

This is the monumental hall of Walhalla, commissioned in the nineteenth century as a memorial to the great figures of German history. On its north side is this pediment frieze showing the victory of Arminius and the Germanic tribes over the Romans at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. This is an unusual frieze as it adds more depth to the figures than would appear in a normal relief.

The most famous is shown in Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s beautiful painting of Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends (1868), whose admiring figures include Pericles (at the right), Aspasia, Alcibiades and Socrates.

In two-dimensional visual art, particularly painting, the term frieze is also used to describe an arrangement of figures that are flattened into a plane parallel to the plane of the picture, thus resembling those seen in architectural friezes.

Among the most spectacular wall-paintings of Pompeii are those in the Villa of the Mysteries showing Dionysian Rites from before about 62 CE. Room 5 contains a frieze of 29 figures at nearly life size, apparently depicting a sequence of ritual events involving a mixture of Pompeiians and deities.

In the period before three-dimensional linear projection became widely adopted in European art, many paintings adopted a similar approach for groups of figures. But long afterwards the frieze continued to be used in the right circumstances.

Masaccio’s Adoration of the Magi (1426-7) delivers a frieze-like view of this popular subject. The Virgin Mary is sat on a golden portable folding chair decorated with lion heads and paws, the infant Christ on her knee. To the left of her is the standard group of ox and ass in a shed, and behind her is Joseph, holding one of the gifts from the Magi. Hints at depth are given in the heights of some figures, but they are confined to a shallow plane parallel to the picture plane.

When Raphael painted The Marriage of the Virgin known by its Italian name of Il Sposalizio (‘the marriage’), in 1504, he combined the frieze of figures in the foreground with grand architecture expertly projected in depth. This demonstrates the contrast between the flat frieze in the foreground and the depth of the building behind.

Some motifs are prone to creating frieze effects, and painters have gone out of their way to avoid that.

William Blake Richmond’s An Audience in Athens During Agamemnon by Aeschylus from 1884 is a study of the enraptured audience of a play. Its classical setting has strong formal symmetry, with its central figure perhaps representing the playwright himself. Richmond uses greatly exaggerated aerial perspective, with intense chroma in the foreground falling off rapidly towards the back of the theatre, to give depth to what would otherwise have appeared flat and frieze-like.

Late in the nineteenth century some artists like Ferdinand Hodler adopted frieze effects.

Hodler’s World-Weary (1891-92) was an important early work in the development of his style of Parallelism, with its emphasis on the symmetry and rhythms seen in society. He painted this frieze from models who sat for him in a local cemetery during the autumn of 1891.

The Disappointed Souls (1892), another in this series, also shows five older men, this time dressed in black robes and sat on a bench in barren fields.

Most wall coverings such as tapestries, drapes and wallpaper aren’t designed for rooms that see arduous use, or get wet. For those an even older solution has stood the test of time, with baked clay or ceramic tiles. They have been widely used to protect the walls of wet areas like bathrooms, rooms where the walls need to be washed down frequently like kitchens, and in inns and bars. They may also be used instead of a wooden ‘skirting board’ at the base of an interior wall, where damp is a common problem.

The production of tin-glazed earthenware plates and tiles in the Low Countries started in about 1500 in the port of Antwerp, but when that city was sacked in 1576, most potters moved north. From about 1615, those in Delft developed distinctive products with blue decoration on a white base. When there was an interruption to the supply of Chinese porcelain in 1620, this Delftware was ready to take the market. By this time what had been earthenware had been refined to the point where it looked as good as expensive porcelain.

Delftware plates populated many shelves and dressers of the Dutch Golden Age, but most numerous were small tiles, produced by the million. Some houses in the Netherlands still have those Delft blue-on-white tiles dating from the seventeenth century. This article celebrates their appearance in paintings of interiors (mostly).

Inevitably, they feature in at least one of Jan Vermeer’s wonderful interiors.

Vermeer’s Milkmaid from about 1660 shows a kitchen or house maid pouring milk from a jug, beside a tabletop with bread. Behind the bread is a dark blue studded mug with pewter lid, and just in front of the woman (to the right of the mug) a brown earthenware ‘Dutch oven’ pot into which the milk is being poured. The wall behind is white and bare apart from a couple of nails embedded towards its top, and several small holes where other nails once were. At its foot, at the bottom right, five Delft tiles run along the base. In front of those is a traditional foot-warmer, consisting of a metal coal holder inside a wooden case.

Several artists in the nineteenth century returned to similar interiors from the Dutch Golden Age.

A Soldier and Men in an Inn is one of Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate’s period scenes, showing a room with the walls decorated by blue on white Delft tiles.

Early in the career of the Dutch artist Jozef Israëls, he painted The Seamstress (1850-88) as a scene from the Golden Age. A young Dutchwoman works with her needle and thread in the light of an unseen window at the left. In the background to the right, there’s a group of Delft tiles on the wall, and there’s a single tulip in a glass vase at the left.

The greatest exponent of these views from history is Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema, wife of the renowned Victorian painter Sir Lawrence. Unlike her husband, who had been born in the Netherlands and trained in Antwerp, she came from London, but fell in love with these Dutch interiors.

Her undated painting of The Bible Lesson is one of her earlier examples, and features an older woman teaching her young granddaughter from Biblical scenes depicted on the Delft tiles in her house.

Just as her husband Lawrence researched his classical paintings to achieve accuracy and authenticity, so Laura did the same for her historical paintings, such as A Carol (date not known), showing a group of children singing carols outside the door of what appears to be an apartment.

A Knock at the Door (1897, Opus 90) is her most explicit painting in terms of dates. It’s set in 1684, during the period of peace between the Second Treaty of Westminster (1674) and Treaty of Nijmegen (1678), and the crisis in relations with England that arose in 1688. She has also not only provided an Opus number (90), but a date for her painting of 1897. This attractive young woman checks that she’s looking at her best in a mirror, presumably just before she receives a visitor. Lining the wall at floor level is a fine series of Delft tiles.

Her undated In Good Hands is another period domestic interior, as one of the older daughters keeps watch over a younger brother as he sleeps in a four-poster bed beside his windmill toy. The girl rests her feet on a foot warmer similar to Vermeer’s as she sews to pass the time. To her right is a single Delft tile on the wall close to the floor.

When I first saw Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s undated Battledore and Shuttlecock I was fascinated by its floor. Not so much the animal skin that seems ostentatious even for the rich, but its unique tiles decorated with a pattern based on the artist’s family monograms. This shows the predecessor to modern badminton, then often played indoors by young women wearing full dresses.

Delft tiles were by no means the only ceramics to be fixed to walls, and there’s also a long and fine tradition of Islamic wall tiling.

Georges Jules Victor Clairin’s portrait of An Ouled-Naïl Tribal Dancer from 1895 takes us briefly outdoors to see these beautiful botanical designs.