The revival of paintings of interiors in the middle of the nineteenth century flourished in several ways. For some, it was an opportunity to reveal their studio, and perhaps provide the viewer with a little insight into the artist. For others it was a way to recreate interiors of the past, or to deliver open-ended narrative.

The Painter and His Model (1855) shows one of Alfred Stevens’ young and fashionable models leaning over his shoulder, as he works on her portrait.

Stevens was an early enthusiast for the Japonisme that swept Paris. Insights into his life such as his The Psyché (My Studio) (c 1871) repay closer reading. The French word psyché refers to the full-length mirror seen in this apparently informal view of Stevens’ studio, the name deriving from the legend of Cupid and Psyche.

For this painting, Stevens doesn’t actually use a proper psyché, but has mounted a large mirror on his easel, perhaps to suggest that art is a reflection of life. A Japanese silk garment is draped over the mirror to limit its view to the model, breaking up her form in an unnatural way. At the lower right, the artist indicates his presence with a cigarette, and there is a small parrot who might imitate his speech. The studio is littered with Japanese prints and the artist’s canvases, and one painting on the wall is a study for his early What They Call Vagrancy, lacking most of its figures.

Léon Frédéric’s extraordinary Studio Interior from 1882 appears to be a fantasy self-portrait of the artist naked with a skeleton on his lap. The latter has been dressed up in undergarments with a long starry veil over them. His palette and brushes are at the lower right, and his clothes, including a top hat, are draped on chairs.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sunday Morning from about 1871 goes back to the interior of a house in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. The mistress of the house has just had a baby, and her midwife is holding that baby as she looks out into the daylight. This is a smaller version of a previous painting by Alma-Tadema titled A Birth Chamber, Seventeenth Century (1868), that extended the view to include the mother in bed.

The Music Room, painted by Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate in 1871 using oils, shows the fine quality of his conservative oil paintings. It’s worth bearing in mind that at this time the French Impressionists had already established their very different style, and this work is more typical of paintings from a century earlier. While this 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.

In 1872, James Tissot embarked on a series of paintings and engravings set in a tavern on the bank of the River Thames in London, probably in Rotherhithe or Wapping. The first to be exhibited was his An Interesting Story (c 1872). It’s the late 1700s, and an old soldier is telling one or more pretty young women interminable and incomprehensible stories about his military career, with the aid of charts spread out on the table. Here, the story is dubbed ‘interesting’ in irony.

Edgar Degas painted A Cotton Office in New Orleans in 1873, when he visited his mother’s family in New Orleans. It features several family portraits, and has a narrative background, showing a cotton buyer visiting the Musson cotton merchants. The elderly gentleman wearing a top hat, in the foreground, is Michel Musson, Degas’ uncle, and a partner in the business. Edgar Degas’ brothers Achille and René are slightly further back on the left (leaning idly against the open window), and sat reading a newspaper, respectively. Standing at the desk on the right is John Lavaudais, the cashier. The figures echo and repeat one another across and into the depths of the room, in dress, posture, and appearance.

While almost everyone else in the painting is lounging around, business is being transacted between the buyer and broker on either side of the table covered with the cotton, the broker being at the centre of the canvas. This small pool of commerce within an image dominated by idleness and dolce far niente reflects the situation of Degas and his family at the time.

At about the same time in New York, the American genre artist Eastman Johnson painted a narrative work that only makes any sense when you know its title of Not at Home (c 1873), showing the interior of the artist’s home. Without those three words of the title, all you see is a well-lit and empty parlour, and the presumed mistress of the house starting up the stairs, in relative gloom in the foreground. At the right is a child’s push-chair, parked up and empty.

Those three words, of course, are the classic excuse offered in someone’s absence – “I am sorry, but the Mistress is not at home” – even when they are very much at home, but simply don’t want to see the visitor. So the title could imply that the woman is ascending the stairs in order not to see visitors. Or, if we know that this is the artist’s home, could it be that it’s Johnson himself who’s not at home?

Interiors don’t have to be domestic, as demonstrated by Louis Béroud’s early Staircase of the Opéra Garnier from 1877.

At about this time, Nordic artists started to realise the potential of interiors as explorations of light, led by the work of Harriet Backer.

Avskjeden (The Farewell) (1878) was probably Backer’s first really successful painting. It shows a grown daughter, left of centre, bidding farewell to her family as she leaves home. Backer probably painted this from her own emotional experience, as her father died in 1877, and she had informed her mother that she didn’t intend returning home, but to pursue her painting career instead.

When she travelled to France, her style began to loosen up: another early success was her Solitude (c 1880), her first painting accepted for the Salon in 1880. This was one of her first interiors featuring limited light, whose play was to become a dominant theme in her art.

Backer’s Blue Interiør from 1883 develops the theme of the play of light from the window on the person and contents of the interior of the room. Here the composition is complicated by the presence of a large mirror at the left.

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.

The little we know of Sappho is, like the little remaining of her poetry, scant and fragmentary. She was arguably the greatest classical Greek lyrical poet, a lesbian of renown, and was alleged to have thrown herself from a cliff when a male lover left her.

Dearth of information about her, and its apparent inconsistency, hasn’t stopped a wealth of speculative writing, and her appearance in a great many paintings, few of which are consistent with her sexuality. Here I’ll consider one text, the fictional letter written for her by Ovid in his Heroines, and a selection of those paintings.

Born around 630 BCE into a wealthy family on the Greek island of Lesbos, legend has associated her romantically with two men: a contemporary poet, Alcaeus, and Phaon a local ferryman. Her own name and that of her island have been associated with her sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and Ovid makes it clear that her love of women was well-known among Romans in his time.

Since around 300 BCE, there has been a legend that tells of her love for Phaon the ferryman, who plied the waters between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland. Almost certainly illiterate and hardly a good audience for Sappho’s verse, Phaon’s redeeming feature was apparently the gift of great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus/Aphrodite in his boat; the goddess was travelling in disguise as an old woman, Phaon didn’t charge her for the crossing, so she returned the favour by transforming his physical appearance.

Ovid’s description of Sappho’s affair with Phaon leaves little to the imagination, even down to their lovemaking.

Among those who seem to have accepted the truth of this legend was Jacques-Louis David, in this painting of Sappho and Phaon from 1809. David was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently occupied bed behind them, and a post-orgasmic gaze on Sappho’s face. In case you haven’t got the message, Cupid holds her lyre, and two doves peck affectionately on the window sill.

A little deeper into Victorian prudery, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sappho (1881) shows Sappho resting on a lectern and staring intently at Alcaeus, who is playing a lyre. She’s supported by her ‘school of girls’, one of whom rests her arm on Sappho’s back. The artist’s hints at a lesbian interpretation are necessarily subtle: the marble benches bear the names of some of her female lovers.

Yet nearly twenty years earlier, Simeon Solomon was far more open in his watercolour of Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864). Sappho is shown on the right, her dark hair and complexion in accordance with Ovid’s description. Although Erinna, another woman poet of the time, might have joined Sappho in her community of young women on Lesbos, she is now thought to have lived on the island of Telos, and slightly later.

Solomon’s career was all but destroyed by his own sexuality: a brave pioneer of homosexual themes in his painting, he was arrested for homosexual offences in 1873, and was shunned thereafter.

Ovid’s fictional letter from Sappho to Phaon was written after the legendary ferryman moved to Sicily. It’s unusual among his Heroines for depicting a real, historical figure, albeit in this legendary story.

The letter can be read in at least two ways. It could, in spite of its multiple clear references to Sappho’s lesbian lifestyle, be just another male denial of female homosexuality. This seems unlikely for many reasons, not least of which is the gross implausibility of everything about the letter. This has led some to doubt that Ovid even wrote it, an issue that remains hotly debated. Ovid shows profound and progressive insights into human sexuality; if this letter was written by him, it comes over as an excellent debunking of the legend of Phaon, and a witty and irreverent commentary on the life and loves of another great poet.

The story of Sappho and Phaon has, however, stuck. Its climax, when the broken-hearted Sappho throws herself from the top of the Leucadian Cliff, became an extremely popular motif in nineteenth century painting.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin paints a portrait of Sappho looking in sad reflection, her head resting on a symbolic lyre. There is little to indicate that she is on the top of cliffs, apart from the title, and no narrative references.

Théodore Chassériau’s watercolour of Sappho Leaping into the Sea from the Leucadian Promontory (c 1840) shows her clutching her lyre, her arms braced across her chest, as she steps off the edge of the cliff.

Sappho’s suicide became something of an obsession for Gustave Moreau, who painted her repeatedly between about 1870 and 1893.

Moreau’s Death of Sappho was probably in progress when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and wasn’t completed until after order was restored to Paris the following year. It shows the poet moments after she had thrown herself from the cliff, her body lying in peaceful repose, her lyre beside her, and a seagull in mourning. The contrast between the elaborate decoration of her body, clothing, and lyre and the stark rocks and gloomy sea and sky couldn’t be greater.

Sappho (1871-72) was his second painting of her, this time a richly-detailed watercolour. Here she is swooning over her lover shortly before flinging herself to her doom. Her lyre is slung over her shoulder, and to emphasise her status as a great poet, Apollo’s gryphon is shown on a column behind her. Her elaborately decorated clothing and pose were taken from a Japanese woodcut, Genji taking the air in summer on the Sumida by Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), that Moreau had bought in Paris.

Moreau returned to his consideration of Sappho’s suicide in this watercolour of Sappho at the Leucadian Cliff (c 1885), showing her clinging to her lyre as she falls to her death on the rocks below. This is lit by one of Moreau’s saturnine suns.

In Moreau’s late oil painting of Sappho from about 1893, she is seen stepping off the cliff, with the sun setting behind her.

During this period, those influenced by Moreau also painted the poet. Jules-Élie Delaunay’s undated Sappho Embracing her Lyre shows her at the top of the cliff holding her lyre close, as if it were her lover.

Ary Renan painted Sappho at least twice. The first from 1893 appears influenced by Moreau’s paintings. Sappho reclines underwater amid a fantastic and deep layer of vegetation, her lyre some distance from her head, at the right edge.

Renan’s later painting shows her just as she has stepped off the top of the cliff, and is about to plunge to her death. She holds her lyre aloft in her left hand, as a surprised seagull flies past.

Ovid’s letter, written two millennia ago, shows wittily how absurd the legend of Sappho and Phaon is. Yet so many artists since have continued to depict it in paint, perpetuating its naïve denial.