Folding screens were first recorded in ancient China, where they were used as portable room dividers and as decorative furniture. They’re thought to have made their way to Europe in the late Middle Ages, and started to spread more widely during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Early screens were made of wood, but were soon covered with painted paper or silk. Kanō Hideyori’s magnificent Maple Viewers (紙本著色観楓図) (Muromachi, early 1500s) is painted on paper in the classical style of the Kanō school, then applied to a six-section folding screen.

In Europe, screens served several purposes in addition to dividing a larger space into two. They could be used to keep drafts away, provide privacy, hide a feature like a servant’s entrance to a kitchen, or purely for decoration.

In the fourth painting in William Hogarth’s moralising narrative series Marriage A-la-Mode, The Toilette (c 1743), Countess Squander is being entertained while completing her dressing and preparations for the day. In the background at the right is a painted screen showing a masquerade ball.

It was the popularity of East Asian artefacts in the latter half of the nineteenth century that put folding screens in many homes and quite a few paintings. They featured in at least two of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s works from the mid-1860s.

Behind Whistler’s Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, is a painted screen from Japan.

A more elaborately painted screen forms the backdrop to Whistler’s Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen from 1864.

Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti’s The Duet (1870) attracted favourable reviews when exhibited at the Royal Academy. This features a decorated folding screen from East Asia in the left background. The artist was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, and was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sister-in-law.

In 1872 William Quiller-Orchardson completed Dolce Far Niente, incorporating in its painted screen a contemporary flavour of Japonisme. His woman, dressed in sober black, reclines on a thoroughly European chaise longue, her open book and fan beside her as she stares idly out of an unseen window.

Like other artists of the day, Elihu Vedder developed a fascination for objets d’art from the Far East, which he assembled in this Japanese Still Life in 1879. This unusual collection may have been assisted by the fact that his brother was a US Navy doctor who was stationed in Japan as it was being re-opened to the West.

Bouderie, which means sulking, is a splendid and intimate portrait of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s friend and colleague Gustave Courtois, painted in 1880. Courtois is seen at one end of a large sofa, smiling wryly and staring into the distance. He holds his palette and brushes in his left hand, and what may be a long mahlstick in the right. At the opposite end of the sofa, turned with her back towards Courtois, is a young woman dressed in fashionable clothing, in black throughout, apart from white lace trim at the foot of her skirts. Also shown is a screen decorated with Japanese imagery, and on the floor the skin of a big cat, perhaps a lioness.

Pierre Bonnard developed his earlier Man and Woman in an Interior into his Man and Woman in about 1900. Marthe isn’t getting dressed here, but sits up in the sunshine. A folded wooden screen divides the painting into two. Bonnard stands at the right edge of the painting, his legs looking skeletal in the sunlight.

William McGregor Paxton’s Tea Leaves (1909) show two well-dressed young women taking tea together. The woman in the blue-trimmed hat seems to be staring into the leaves at the bottom of her cup, a traditional means of fortune-telling, and behind them is a large folding screen, whose details are intentionally blurred and vague.

The New Necklace from the following year is one of Paxton’s best-known paintings, and perhaps his most intriguing open narrative. A younger woman is sat at a narrow bureau writing. She has turned her chair to reach behind and hold out her left hand to receive the new necklace from a slightly older woman in a dark blue-green dress. Their backdrop is another folding screen, this time with its East Asian painting clearly visible.

My final screen is the painting itself.

Pierre Bonnard’s exquisite three-panelled Japoniste screen of The Stork and Four Frogs was painted at the outset of his career, in about 1889. Its story is contrastingly European, and based on one of Aesop’s fables retold by Jean de La Fontaine’s The Frogs who Demand a King.

The version retold by La Fontaine centres on a colony of frogs, who ask Jupiter for a king. The god’s first response to their request is a laid-back and gentle leader, whom the frogs reject as being too weak to rule them. Jupiter’s second attempt is a crane, who kills and eats the frogs for his pleasure. When the frogs complain to Jupiter, he then responds that they had better be happy with what they have got this time, or they could be given something even worse. Bonnard’s magnificent panel is traditionally interpreted not as showing the evil crane of the second attempt, but the first and gentle ruler.

Even for those well versed in the act of writing, it usually demanded a formal technique and took place at a dedicated piece of furniture, a writing desk. That often provided storage for the quills, pens and ink required, as well as a stock of paper. They could also be more elaborate and house a complete office with correspondence sorted into drawers, and pigeonholes that much later were models for software mailboxes. For the wealthy these more elaborate writing desks might be crafted by a joiner using exotic woods into a large bureau.

Antonello da Messina’s groundbreaking oil painting of Saint Jerome in his Study from around 1475 features an integrated office with shelving, although there are few books visible.

Gerard ter Borch’s Woman Writing a Letter from about 1655 shows a more modest desk doubling as a table. Its heavy decorated table cover has been pushed back to make room for the quill, ink-pot, and letter. Behind the woman is her bed, surrounded by heavy drapery, and at the lower right is the brilliant red flash of the seat.

Vermeer painted at least two works showing women writing, of which the earlier is A Lady Writing a Letter from 1665-1666. The fur trimmings on her golden jacket confirm that this is no country bumpkin, but the lady of an affluent and well-educated house. Rather than looking down at her quill, she stares the viewer out, her faint smile of confidence lit by sunlight coming through the window off to the left. This illustrates the importance of placing a writing table or desk where it can be lit well by daylight, hence an association between writing desks and windows.

Matthäus Kern’s watercolour showing A Study Interior at St. Polten (1837) reveals two contrasting types of writing desk: that at the right edge has a drawer and pigeonholes above to order papers and correspondence, while the long desk to the left of it has books, papers and writing instruments laid out across its flat surface, and a folding extension leaf to accommodate even more.

Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s painting of Kit’s Writing Lesson from 1852 shows this young character from Charles Dickens’ novel The Old Curiosity Shop struggling to write with a more modern dip pen. Sewing next to Kit Nubbles is the orphaned heroine Nell Trent, who is teaching him to write in the shop where he works.

Lesser Ury’s Woman at a Writing-Desk from 1898 is an everyday interior with a woman, a pianist perhaps, sitting writing at her bureau-style desk. The popularity of bureaux was perhaps one mark of the achievement of education.

Paul Helleu’s portrait of Madame Paul Helleu Seated at Her Secretaire, Seen from the Back from about 1900 is an unconventional view of his wife, who appears dressed for a social engagement rather than catching up with her letter-writing.

There’s dispute as to whether this painting by Félix Vallotton shows a Woman Reading in an Interior, as given by its French title, or a woman writing. Vallotton painted this in 1904, and its single figure doesn’t show her face as she sits at her small bureau, backlit by the light streaming in through the window.

Pierre Bonnard painted a few interiors featuring a woman writing. The Letter from about 1906 is a conventional portrait of a well-dressed woman sitting at a desk or table to write a letter, and may have used Anita Champagne as the model. Her right hand holds a fountain pen with its own ink reservoir, a big step forward from the quill.

The New Necklace (1910) is one of William McGregor Paxton’s best-known paintings, and perhaps his most intriguing open narrative. A younger woman is sat at a narrow bureau writing. She has turned her chair so that she can reach behind and hold out her left hand to receive the new necklace of the title. This is being lowered into her hand by a slightly older woman, in a dark blue-green dress, whose face and eyes are cast down, and her left hand rests against her chin. The writing desk of this bureau is hinged so that it stores vertically and encloses the drawers inside.

A last aside: not one of these writers appears to be holding their quill or pen in their left hand. Teachers of the past weren’t as accommodating.

It’s not that long ago that a great many homes in the UK and Europe were heated by open fires. During the 1960s, the house where I lived in the suburbs of London had a single main fireplace burning ‘smokeless’ processed coal throughout the winter months. Even after colour television came in the early 1970s, the National Coal Board was advertising the virtues of open fires in the home. Today’s paintings of interiors show fireplaces and the objects we surrounded them with.

Jules Breton’s Grandfather’s Birthday (1864) shows three generations of a Courrières family living in modest comfort, although their floors are made of bare and worn tiles, furniture is sparse, and the fire is hardly alight. One of the grandchildren is just about to present their grandpa with a simple birthday cake, no icing, as another of the women prepares a celebratory meal in the kitchen. Maybe some firewood might have been a better present. This fireplace has an unusually high mantelpiece, providing just enough room to fit in some cherished plates below the ceiling.

Judging by the thin summer dress worn by the young woman reading in Francis Davis Millet’s Cosey Corner from 1884, the fire burning in this open hearth is primarily to boil water in the large black kettle for her cup of tea. This is a more modern fireplace fabricated in wrought iron. It has a grate to let spent ashes drop into the ash tray underneath, making it simpler to remove them before building the first fire of the day. On either side of the fire are fire dogs, and a kettle is suspended above the glowing embers.

Virginie Demont-Breton’s original painting of The Man is at Sea, above, was completed in or before 1889. This shows a fisherman’s wife warming herself and her sleeping infant by the fire, while her husband is away fishing at sea. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1889, following which it was rapidly engraved for prints. Later that year, Vincent van Gogh saw an image of that painting when he was undergoing treatment in the Saint Paul asylum at Saint-Rémy, and made a copy of it, shown below.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s contrasting The Artist’s Wife and Children, from 1904, shows his wife Sigrid with their young son and daughter, in front of the roaring fire typical of the more affluent middle class home in the early twentieth century. The fireplace is here built into a substantial structure.

Carl Larsson’s Christmas Eve from 1904 shows his large extended family gathering to celebrate in grand style, with a huge turkey, a roaring fire in the large open fireplace, and a cat under the table, trying to get into the party.

William McGregor Paxton’s open fire In the Studio (1905) is appropriately classy and glows confidently in the background. He deliberately defocussed it in what he termed Vermeer’s “binocular vision”. His model is in crisp focus, and as the eye wonders further away from her as the optical centre of the painting, edges and details become progressively more blurred.

Among Douglas Fox Pitt’s views of domestic interiors, Interior with Maid from about 1913 is notable for its display of two of the artist’s collection of paintings by the Camden Town Group. Above the fireplace is Harold Gilman’s Norwegian Street Scene (Kirkegaten, Flekkerfjord) (1913), and above the bright cushion is Charles Ginner’s The Wet Street, Dieppe (1911). The fire is being tended by a maid, and is thoroughly suburban, with tools including a poker at the left. Its mantelpiece is relatively low, and home to a precisely arranged row of ornaments.

Henry Tonks’ Sodales – Mr Steer and Mr Sickert (1930) shows two British painters in their old age: Philip Wilson Steer is dozing in front of the fire while Walter Sickert was visiting him at home in Cheyne Walk, London. This mantelpiece is cluttered with various small objects.

As the number of rooms not primarily used for sleeping accommodation grew, every good home came to have a dining room, usually adjacent to the kitchen. This was more or less filled by a table where the whole family, and sometimes its guests, could sit and eat. A few dining rooms have been captured in paint.

Gustave Courbet’s After Dinner in Ornans from 1849 marks the start of his series of realist paintings of everyday life in his home town in rural France. Four middle-class men have just finished dining together in a dark room with a flagstone floor. As one lights a tobacco pipe, the man at the right plays his violin to entertain them. A large hunting dog is curled asleep under a chair, and the man lighting his pipe is still wearing his hat and a long coat.

Nearly forty years later, 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, although she appears more anonymously as a type rather than a character. This is a far cry from rural Ornans, with its uniformed maid, a spotless tablecloth, plush curtains and a potted plant in the window.

Under the Lamp, painted by Marie Bracquemond in 1887, shows Alfred Sisley and his wife dining in the Braquemonds’ house at Sèvres.

Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885) is a revealing insight into the lives of poor labourers in Nuenen, who are about to feast on a large dish of potatoes under the light of an oil lamp. This dining room appears more improvised, with a table that’s too low to accommodate their knees, and barely enough space to pour out coffee.

In another world just over a decade 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. On top of the dresser are some of the peculiar objects we gather through life.

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. The grown-ups are about to enjoy an evening of cards together with friends.

Fashions for tablecloths and domestic fabrics changed, and by the time that Maurice Denis painted this Breakfast the same year, their patterns overwhelmed the eye.

William McGregor Paxton, a great admirer of Vermeer who adopted the Dutch master’s optical techniques, seems to have painted The Breakfast in 1911 as a ‘problem picture’. As their maid walks out of the dining room, a young wife stares thoughtfully away from her husband, who is showing no interest in her at all, as he hides behind the pages of a broadsheet newspaper. You could cut the atmosphere here with a knife.

In Édouard Vuillard’s Reading in the Dining Room, Vaucresson, Lucy Hessel has already pushed her chair back from the dining table, left her husband Jos reading the newspaper, and is busying herself in the next room.

Evening by the Lamp from 1921 is one of Bonnard’s lamplit interiors, although perhaps by now this room also has electric light. Sat at this dining table are a woman pouring tea, and a grey-haired man.

Finally, Bonnard’s wife Marthe, who developed a lasting fondness for white high-heeled shoes, is seen in his painting of Marthe in the Dining Room from 1933.