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.

Aeneas and his crew are ashore at Caieta (Gaeta), midway between Naples and Rome, where two of the survivors of Ulysses’ crew meet to tell stories from Homer’s Odyssey. Following Achaemenides’ account of their encounter with Polyphemus, he hands over to Macareus to tell of their transformation by the sorceress Circe.

Macareus starts with Aeolus and the bag of winds he gave to Ulysses. For nine days, they experienced favourable winds, but on the tenth the crew opened the bag looking for riches. In doing so they released the winds, which promptly blew the ship back to Aeolus. Then there were the cannibal Laestrygonians, who ate one of the three crew sent to meet them. Their chieftain led a party in pursuit of Ulysses, bombarding his ships with trees and rocks and sinking two of the three. The third ship containing Ulysses, Macareus and others escaped to safety.

They sailed on to Circe’s island, where the surviving crew refused to go beyond its beach. Lots were drawn to form a group to go to Circe’s palace, and they set off. On the way they came across enchanted animals, lions, bears and wolves, which rushed at them but didn’t attack.

Dosso Dossi’s Circe and her Lovers in a Landscape (c 1514-16) is a remarkably early and realistic mythological landscape, with deep rustic lanes, trees, and a distant farmhouse. Circe leans, naked, at the foot of a tree going through spells on a large tablet, with a book of magic open at her feet. Around her are some of the men whom she took a fancy to and transformed into wild creatures. There’s a spoonbill, a small deer, a couple of dogs, a stag, and up in the trees an owl and what could well be a woodpecker, in the upper right corner.

Macareus and his party were taken in to see Circe sat on her throne, busy making a herbal concoction that she had served to them in a barley drink. When she touched their heads with her wand they were all transformed into pigs, apart from Eurylochus, who had refused to drink. He returned to Ulysses and warned him of what had happened to his colleagues.

Briton Rivière’s painting of Circe and her Swine (before 1896) has been used as an illustration for several versions of the Odyssey, and unusually casts Circe as a magic swineherd, with her wand resting behind her.

Alice Pike Barney’s painterly portrait of Circe from about 1915 was most probably made in pastels. Her streaming golden hair almost fills the painting, and wraps the head of the large boar she is embracing.

Ulysses brought Circe a flower he had been given by Mercury, and she took him into her hall, where she tried to lure him to drink her concoction. Ulysses drew his sword, forcing her to back off.

Jan van Bijlert’s Ulysses and Circe from around 1640 shows the couple at the banquet, looking intently at one another. Circe holds her wand, and between them is a goblet containing her magic concoction. At the right, one of the serving maids looks directly at the viewer. At her heels are Ulysses’ crew, in the form of pigs.

Salomon de Bray makes this a more intimate meeting, in his Odysseus and Circe (1650-55). Ulysses is seated clutching a krater-like goblet into which a maid is pouring clear liquid from a bottle. The hero looks quite haggard, and decidedly unimpressed by Circe. Below Ulysses’ left arm, two pigs are drinking more of Circe’s concoction.

Giovanni Andrea Sirani, father and teacher of the great Elisabetta Sirani, painted his account of Ulysses and Circe at about the same time as de Bray, and advances the story a few moments to the point where Ulysses is about to draw his sword. Here Circe is still holding the glass she is trying to get him to drink, with her wand in the other hand. The crew are seen in the background, in the form of pigs. Another woman holding a wand is with them: this could represent their transformation into pigs, or back into humans, so forming multiplex narrative.

The last of the paintings from this period of popularity is Matthijs Naiveu’s Circe and Odysseus from 1702. This is set in a grand banquet inside Circe’s palace, with some peculiar clusters of figures alluding to her role as a sorceress. For example, there’s a table just to the left of the couple at which a satyr and a demon are engaged in conversation. Circe has moved forward from her throne to embrace Ulysses, whose sword is pointing at her body to force her back. The goblet from which she has been trying to get him to drink is held by a maid at the far right. A couple of boars are feeding from fruit laid on the marble floor.

John William Waterhouse’s Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus from 1891 is perhaps the most complex work showing this story. Circe sits on her throne, holding up the krater for Ulysses to drink, with her wand in the other hand. The viewer is Ulysses, seen in the large circular mirror behind the sorceress, preparing to draw his sword. On the left side of the mirror is his ship, and scattered on the ground at Circe’s feet are the herbs and berries she used to prepare the concoction to transform the crew. To the right, one of those pigs lies on the ground, behind a small incense burner.

Ulysses and Circe then married, and she took him off to her bed. As a wedding gift to him, she transformed his crew back into human form, to their great relief. They remained on Circe’s island for a whole year before resuming their journey.