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.

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.

One of the common presentations for European paintings has been in the form of a folding, self-supporting group of several panels. As altarpieces these have graced the space above and behind the altar in a great many of the churches across the continent. While they can have anything from two to twenty or more panels, triptychs with three have been particularly popular, and have become widely adopted for secular paintings as well.

Polyptychs are often used to solve the problem of telling narratives in visual art. By providing two or more images they spare the artist the task of composing a single image that refers to two or more moments in time, for example using multiplex narrative. However, the viewer then needs to know in which order to read the panels, and to see how they integrate into a whole. In this and tomorrow’s article I show some examples of solutions.

Masaccio’s Triptych of San Giovenale was painted early in his career, in 1422, and was only discovered in 1961. It adopts a popular if not conventional layout for an altarpiece, with its central panel showing the Virgin Mary and infant Christ, with two winged angels in attendance. The left wing shows Saints Bartholomew and Blaise, and the right Saints Juvenal, patron of the commissioning church, and Anthony Abbot. Figures in the wings are looking at the central panel, although Saint Blaise is glancing furtively towards the viewer.

Robert Campin’s workshop painted this early narrative triptych of The Entombment of Christ in about 1410-1420. The thread runs from the Crucifixion at the left, where Christ’s cross is empty, through the central entombment scene, to the Resurrection with the empty tomb in the right wing. The figure kneeling at the foot of the left wing is the donor.

Hieronymus Bosch was a prolific painter of triptychs, and several of his finest have survived in excellent condition, considering that they’re more than five centuries old. They follow different compositional strategies.

The three panels of Bosch’s Adoration of the Magi from 1490-1500 form a continuous view of the local Brabant countryside, with its low rolling hills, and a city in the distance; this may be based on Antwerp, the donor’s city, or possibly ‘s-Hertogenbosch where the artist lived and worked. The Adoration itself is in the centre panel, while the wings show the donor and his family with countryside behind.

His famous Garden of Earthly Delights from about 1495-1505 follows a pattern distinctive to Bosch, with the left wing showing a scene from the garden of Eden before the fall of man, the centre containing the main theme, and the right wing the chaos and suffering of the apocalypse. This past-present-future layout is repeated in several of his other triptychs, and was adopted by others.

This is perhaps best developed in his late Haywain Triptych from about 1510-16. The left wing here has a multiplex account of the Fall of Man set in the Garden of Eden, with God the Father shown in the narrative content and in Heaven above, and the fall of angels occurring at the same time. The central panel shows a rich cavalcade of figures, including the emperor and Pope, nobility, courtiers, and many peasants, accompanying a huge and heavily-laden wagon of hay, which is processing from left to right. They are being overseen from Heaven by Jesus Christ. Finally, the right panel shows sinners entering into Hell and undergoing physical torments, with its fires destroying all in the distance.

Although religious polyptychs continued through the Renaissance into the nineteenth century, secular triptychs didn’t become popular until the middle of the nineteenth century, when they were adopted by the Pre-Raphaelites and spread to continental Europe.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted the story of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini in this watercolour triptych in 1855. At the left the lovers are reading the legend of Lancelot and Guinevere; in the centre are Dante and Virgil, and at the right Paolo and Francesca are being blown in the storms of the Second Circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.

The following year Arthur Hughes told the story of The Eve of St Agnes in this triptych, also read from left to right. At the left Porphyro is approaching the castle. In the centre he has woken Madeline, who hasn’t yet taken him into her bed. At the right the couple make their escape over drunken revellers. There is also a second, undated version in the Ashmolean, Oxford, in which the left wing shows a slightly later moment, where Porphyro meets Angela at the entrance to the castle.

Hughes breaks from the tradition of the three panels being hinged, which allowed the wings to be closed over and protect the centre panel, and sets them into a single gilt whole, containing a lengthy quotation from the literary source.

Léon Frédéric’s triptych showing The Legend of Saint Francis (1882) frames the panels individually, but is set in a single outer frame. These show separate episodes from this popular legend, ending at the right with the story of the wolf of Gubbio/Agubbio.

Fritz von Uhde’s setting of the Nativity, The Sacred Night from 1888-89, centres on a modern interpretation of the classic Virgin and Child, with the adoration of the magi on the left, and an angelic choir singing amid the rafters of the barn on the right.

This third and final article devoted to paintings of Easter covers the events after the entombment, from Christ’s body in the sepulchre and the harrowing of Hell, to the Resurrection. Although less frequently painted than the Crucifixion, the Resurrection is the whole purpose of Easter.

William Blake’s The Angels hovering over the body of Christ in the Sepulchre; Christ in the sepulchre, guarded by angels from about 1805 elaborates the gospel accounts of Christ’s body in the sepulchre with reference to the description of the tabernacle in Exodus, chapter 25 verse 20:
And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims be.
This may have been in the light of Hebrews, chapter 9 verse 5:
And over it the cherubims of glory shadowing the mercyseat; of which we cannot now speak particularly.

Just before the end of the sixteenth century, Jan Brueghel the Elder collaborated with Hans Rottenhammer in Christ’s Descent into Limbo (1597). This is set in a grand vision of a dungeon at the edge of a fiery underworld that could have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch.

William Blake’s Christ Appearing to His Disciples/Apostles After the Resurrection is one of his large colour print series from 1795, referring to the gospel of Luke, chapter 24 verses 36-40:
And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, “Peace be unto you.” But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. And he said unto them, “Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.

William Holman Hunt’s Christ and the Two Marys is an early Pre-Raphaelite painting from 1847, the year before the formation of the Brethren, and a time when religious themes were popular among them. The two Marys are Mary Magdalene and “the other” Mary, while Christ, his stigmata plainly visible, has cast off the bandages his body was wrapped in for burial.

Nikolai Ge’s Heralds of the Resurrection, from 1867, probably shows Mary Magdalene rushing to tell the disciples of the news that Christ’s body was missing, and that he was resurrected. At the right are the guards who were placed at the tomb, perhaps.

Several impossible legends grew about Mary Magdalene; here Albert Edelfelt’s Christ and Mary Magdalene, a Finnish Legend (1890) dresses her in contemporary clothing, and transports the two to the lakes and forests of Finland, where the first pale leaves of Spring are on the trees.

Fritz von Uhde has a similarly modern approach in Touch me not. John 20:17 from 1894, this time outside a small town in Germany.

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Why seek ye the living among the dead? (St Luke, Chapter 14, verse 5) (1896) refers to the version in which Mary Magdalene and companion(s) return to Christ’s tomb, only to find its door open and the tomb empty. They are then greeted by two men who inform them that Christ has risen from the dead. Stanhope depicts this in the style of a frieze, the four figures arranged across the painting in a single parallel plane. Although part of a complex narrative, he depicts only a limited window from the story, and in doing so makes his painting simpler and more direct.

Late in the nineteenth century, Eugène Burnand’s most successful painting was The Disciples Peter and John Running to the Tomb on the Morning of the Resurrection from 1898, now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Their faces and hands tell so much, surprisingly for an artist who had concentrated for his whole career on landscapes.

Albin Egger-Lienz painted a thoroughly modern account in 1923-24. He developed the study above, known simply as Resurrection, into the finished painting of Resurrection of Christ below.

I close with a wonderful painting of a more recent Easter Sunday, by the Ukrainian artist Mykola Pymonenko.

Waiting for the Blessing (1891) shows the scene at a country church at dawn on Easter Sunday. The local population is crowding inside, while the women gather with their Paska, traditional ornamental bread that must be blessed before it can be eaten as a brunch. Note how defocussed the crowd in the background appears relative to the women and children in the foreground.

May all our Easters be peaceful, wherever we are!