Separation of living from sleeping accommodation has become increasingly popular in most societies as they have become more affluent and housing has become more spacious. In its extreme, among the wealthy, bedrooms have acquired supplementary areas for dressing and personal grooming, leaving the bedroom itself dedicated to the bed and sleep. For that it’s usually the most private room in a house or apartment.

Emmery Rondahl’s Doctor’s Orders (1882) shows a Danish country doctor writing a prescription for an older patient who is tucked up in a magnificent fitted bed in their own home. Although still a humble dwelling, with an uneven and uncarpeted stone floor, the bed has luxuriant curtains and there’s even a short net curtain at the window.

Edgar Degas’ famously enigmatic Interior from 1868-69 remains fascinating even if you ignore its two figures. 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 it. Just behind her 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’.

The man’s top hat rests, upside down, on top of the cabinet on the far side of the room, just in front of the woman. Despite the obvious implication that they are a couple who have met in that room to engage in a clandestine sexual relationship, the bed is a single not a double. It also shows no sign of having been used, nor has the bedding been disturbed in any way.

There’s a mature fire burning in the fireplace behind the woman and the lamp. There are four paintings or similar objects hanging on the walls, of which only one appears to be decipherable. This is the large rounded rectangular one above the fireplace. Although it appears to be a mirror, the image shown on it doesn’t resemble a reflection of the room’s interior, but looks to be a painting. This might show a bright figure, resembling the woman, in front of some shrubs, with classical buildings behind.

A few years later, in 1876-77, probably when Degas was starting his series depicting women drying themselves after they had bathed, he painted a woman in pastel over a monotype, where the figure is set in the broader context of a bedroom, in Woman Drying Herself after the Bath. This is a plain and simple bedroom, with a single bed and a dressing table with a mirror. Other paintings in this series are closer cropped on the woman.

Morning, Interior (1890) is one of Maximilien Luce’s best-known Divisionist paintings from the late nineteenth century. This is a humbler bedroom situated in the uppermost part of the house, a garret perhaps, his dressing table lacks a mirror, and the bed is a lightweight folding model with a thin mattress.

Before the end of the century, Pierre Bonnard had started painting the intimate interiors that were to dominate his art for much of the rest of his life. Few, though, depicted the bedroom he shared with his partner Marthe.

In 1898, Bonnard painted the first of his controversial works revealing his private life with Marthe, in Man and Woman in an Interior. He stands naked, looking away, as Marthe is getting dressed on the bed. He has also cropped this unusually, as if it was a ‘candid’ photo, enhancing its voyeurism.

Félix Vallotton’s disturbing domestic scenes continued with Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures from 1904. The lady of the house is standing, her back to the viewer, over her maid as the latter is sewing up an evening gown for her. The lady’s face is revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room, where her maid is all but invisible.

John Collier followed Degas’ enigmatic interiors with Mariage de Convenance from 1907. A mother, dressed in the black implicit of widowhood, stands haughty, her right arm resting on the mantlepiece of her daughter’s bedroom. The latter cowers on the floor, her arms and head resting on her bed, in obvious distress. Laid out on the bed is the daughter’s wedding dress, the crux of this painting’s riddle.

Édouard Vuillard’s portrait of Lucy Hessel Reading in her bedroom from 1913 needs more context. Lucy was the wife of the art dealer Jos Hessel (1859-1942), and she was a frequent model, companion and long-term lover of Vuillard. At this time, her husband was Vuillard’s sole dealer.

Just before the Second World War, Eric Ravilious painted a series of contemporary and deserted bedrooms.

The Bedstead (1939), with its wide angle projection, is full of patterns: the wallpaper, floorboards and rugs, and features a mass-produced iron bedstead.

In his Farmhouse Bedroom (1939) the patterns are overwhelming, and its projection has become so extreme that it distorts.

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.

In the first of these two articles looking at the reading of balconies in paintings, I looked at views of balconies from the outside; today we get to join the rich and famous and look out and down on the world below. Before cheap and easy travel became available in the late nineteenth century, standing on a balcony was probably one of the more elevating experiences for most of the population.

There has been speculation as to whether Carpaccio’s Two Venetian Ladies from about 1490 were bored upper class wives, or courtesans in between gigs, although opinion currently favours their nobility. They sit amid a menagerie of peacock, doves and two dogs, staring into the blank distance.

Views from the balcony came of age in the early nineteenth century, with the arrival of paintings of figures standing in front of windows. These developed most obviously in German painting, in Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman at the Window of 1822, further elaborated two years later by his friend and follower Carl Gustav Carus.

First came Carus’ Friedrichian Woman on the Balcony from 1824. High above the rolling wooded countryside of central Germany, a young woman dressed in black sits contemplating the view and facing away from the viewer. The artist tells us where he painted this view from, and adds some foreground detail to help mystify the viewer.

When Carus visited Naples in about 1829-30, he stayed close to Castel dell’Ovo, and framed a view in his Balcony Room with a View of the Bay of Naples (via Santa Lucia and the Castel dell’Ovo). Instead of a figure, there’s a musical instrument, presumably to reinforce that this is Italy. The interior is mainly used for its framing and repoussoir effect.

After Manet’s The Balcony (1868-69), Berthe Morisot, who modelled for that and was soon to become his sister-in-law, painted her own Woman and Child on a Balcony in 1872. She uses the balcony primarily to combine full-length portraits of the two figures with an aerial landscape of Paris. The pillar and flowerpot at the right steer the eye from immediate foreground in a zigzag past the figures to end in the far distance. On the skyline just to the left of the woman is the dark mass of Notre Dame.

It was Gustave Caillebotte who recast and modernised the precursors of Friedrich and Carus for his painting of his brother René, the Young Man at His Window, in 1875.

Strictly speaking, Caillebotte’s younger brother René isn’t on a balcony here, merely standing in front of a balustraded window in the family apartment on the rue de Miromesnil in Paris. But the artist has here realised the interplay between the rich red upholstery of the interior and the bright exterior with its pale buildings and trees. Between those two worlds is a substantial stone balustrade. Caillebotte gives his figures the mysterious anonymity of facing away from us too.

Five years later, Caillebotte embarked on a series of paintings from the balconies of his apartment, of which the best-known is Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (1880). The interior has been replaced by intermediate details: a trough of flowers, the ornate iron balustrade, and a colourful awning.

Less well-known are two views looking along the length of A Balcony (1880), above, and another Man on a Balcony (1880), below. Both are revelatory in showing the faces of their figures who are looking across our direction of view, down at the exterior world below. Both are strongly projected to a vanishing point close to one edge of the canvas, and the view above places the head of one of its two figures at that focal point.

Caillebotte went on to paint a couple of tightly-cropped images showing small sections of balustrade with the trees and buildings below. Finally in 1884, he bought Manet’s The Balcony for his private collection.

The Norwegian painter Hans Heyerdahl, who was living in Paris at the time, responded with his close-cropped At the Window in 1881 (above), and the following year his compatriot Christian Krohg painted his Portrait of the Swedish Painter Karl Nordström (below) using the same artistic device. Krohg didn’t paint this in Paris, but as he neared the end of his time in France in the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, in the Spring of 1882.

Heyerdahl engages deeply in the interplay between the woman’s interior world, with a half-open book on her lap, and her distant gaze towards the bright exterior.

Prior to this development of the themes of Friedrich and Carus, balconies had often played minor roles in portrait paintings. Maybe the sitter leaned on a section of balustrade, or a flowerpot cascaded its blooms from a pillar. In the late nineteenth century, balconies acquired greater prominence in a wide range of portraits and figurative paintings. Some of that was undoubtedly the result of their increasing availability: with the growth of cities, balconies became popular features of upmarket city apartments, particularly those in Paris.

This portrait of Maximilien Luce’s then unmarried partner and model Ambroisine ‘Simone’ Bouin, Madame Luce on the Balcony from 1893, is an example with objects from its interior set out in the outside sunshine.

Richard Bergh’s Nordic Summer’s Evening (1899-1900) features two distinguished models, Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, and the singer Karin Pyk, who were both close friends of the artist. In fact, it’s a wonderful composite: the pillars shown were borrowed from the floor below, where they supported this balcony, and Pyk was actually painted when she was in Assisi in Italy. Their figures look not at one another, but their gazes cross paths as they stare at the still parkland beyond, lit by the low sun.

We can only imagine the ‘cheating’ that Isaak Brodsky must have contrived to paint this marvellous Self-portrait with Daughter in 1911. Here, the balcony is an integral part of an aerial precinct in the town; there is no sight of ground level. Brodsky’s world exists a couple of stories above.

Lovis Corinth painted this Balcony Scene in Bordighera in 1912 early during his convalescence in the Midi after his stroke the previous year.

The scene in Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s Lady on a Balcony appears more relaxed. His sitter, I.A. Yusupova, looks to be enjoying the fine summer weather in Koreiz, not far from Yalta, on the northern coast of the Black Sea. At about this time, the Balkans had been plunged into crisis following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and by the end of July the Great War had begun. During its closing stages, the Crimean Peninsula was swept up in the Russian Civil War, and changed hands every few months, with tens of thousands being massacred during the chaos.

The last artist whose paintings I show here had a lasting fascination for painting views through windows, extending to the balconies he had added to his homes: Pierre Bonnard.

In La Fenêtre (The Window) from 1925, Bonnard frames the view from his villa in Le Cannet looking inland, and includes part of the all-important balcony.

One of Bonnard’s fullest views of a balcony comes in The French Windows with Dog from 1927, where our gaze is led from its interior, out through the French windows, over the decking and wooden balustrade, to the palms and town of Le Cannet beyond.

The view from the balcony is a journey through life.