Most wall coverings such as tapestries, drapes and wallpaper aren’t designed for rooms that see arduous use, or get wet. For those an even older solution has stood the test of time, with baked clay or ceramic tiles. They have been widely used to protect the walls of wet areas like bathrooms, rooms where the walls need to be washed down frequently like kitchens, and in inns and bars. They may also be used instead of a wooden ‘skirting board’ at the base of an interior wall, where damp is a common problem.

The production of tin-glazed earthenware plates and tiles in the Low Countries started in about 1500 in the port of Antwerp, but when that city was sacked in 1576, most potters moved north. From about 1615, those in Delft developed distinctive products with blue decoration on a white base. When there was an interruption to the supply of Chinese porcelain in 1620, this Delftware was ready to take the market. By this time what had been earthenware had been refined to the point where it looked as good as expensive porcelain.

Delftware plates populated many shelves and dressers of the Dutch Golden Age, but most numerous were small tiles, produced by the million. Some houses in the Netherlands still have those Delft blue-on-white tiles dating from the seventeenth century. This article celebrates their appearance in paintings of interiors (mostly).

Inevitably, they feature in at least one of Jan Vermeer’s wonderful interiors.

Vermeer’s Milkmaid from about 1660 shows a kitchen or house maid pouring milk from a jug, beside a tabletop with bread. Behind the bread is a dark blue studded mug with pewter lid, and just in front of the woman (to the right of the mug) a brown earthenware ‘Dutch oven’ pot into which the milk is being poured. The wall behind is white and bare apart from a couple of nails embedded towards its top, and several small holes where other nails once were. At its foot, at the bottom right, five Delft tiles run along the base. In front of those is a traditional foot-warmer, consisting of a metal coal holder inside a wooden case.

Several artists in the nineteenth century returned to similar interiors from the Dutch Golden Age.

A Soldier and Men in an Inn is one of Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate’s period scenes, showing a room with the walls decorated by blue on white Delft tiles.

Early in the career of the Dutch artist Jozef Israëls, he painted The Seamstress (1850-88) as a scene from the Golden Age. A young Dutchwoman works with her needle and thread in the light of an unseen window at the left. In the background to the right, there’s a group of Delft tiles on the wall, and there’s a single tulip in a glass vase at the left.

The greatest exponent of these views from history is Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema, wife of the renowned Victorian painter Sir Lawrence. Unlike her husband, who had been born in the Netherlands and trained in Antwerp, she came from London, but fell in love with these Dutch interiors.

Her undated painting of The Bible Lesson is one of her earlier examples, and features an older woman teaching her young granddaughter from Biblical scenes depicted on the Delft tiles in her house.

Just as her husband Lawrence researched his classical paintings to achieve accuracy and authenticity, so Laura did the same for her historical paintings, such as A Carol (date not known), showing a group of children singing carols outside the door of what appears to be an apartment.

A Knock at the Door (1897, Opus 90) is her most explicit painting in terms of dates. It’s set in 1684, during the period of peace between the Second Treaty of Westminster (1674) and Treaty of Nijmegen (1678), and the crisis in relations with England that arose in 1688. She has also not only provided an Opus number (90), but a date for her painting of 1897. This attractive young woman checks that she’s looking at her best in a mirror, presumably just before she receives a visitor. Lining the wall at floor level is a fine series of Delft tiles.

Her undated In Good Hands is another period domestic interior, as one of the older daughters keeps watch over a younger brother as he sleeps in a four-poster bed beside his windmill toy. The girl rests her feet on a foot warmer similar to Vermeer’s as she sews to pass the time. To her right is a single Delft tile on the wall close to the floor.

When I first saw Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s undated Battledore and Shuttlecock I was fascinated by its floor. Not so much the animal skin that seems ostentatious even for the rich, but its unique tiles decorated with a pattern based on the artist’s family monograms. This shows the predecessor to modern badminton, then often played indoors by young women wearing full dresses.

Delft tiles were by no means the only ceramics to be fixed to walls, and there’s also a long and fine tradition of Islamic wall tiling.

Georges Jules Victor Clairin’s portrait of An Ouled-Naïl Tribal Dancer from 1895 takes us briefly outdoors to see these beautiful botanical designs.

No one knows when people started attaching big sheets of paper to walls as posters, but it wasn’t until large-format colour printing became popular in the middle of the nineteenth century that the modern poster became commonplace. Within a couple of decades walls in many public places became covered with announcements, particularly those promoting events and products, and the advertising industry developed. In this week’s two articles about the reading of paintings, I show examples of the use of posters in paintings, and how their contents can be relevant.

One of the earliest examples of a poster contributing to the reading of a painting is one of Richard Dadd’s watercolour series of the Passions, in Want, the Malingerer dated 26 November 1856. From a hill overlooking the River Medway at Chatham, where Dadd was born and brought up, he shows a small family of destitutes. The father, his face hidden behind a poster seeking a “good Christian home to a poor forlorn outcast”, appears to be a military veteran, has a couple of crutches, and bare feet. The mother, her face aged beyond her years, is slumped in her tattered clothing, her right hand stretched out, its wrinkled palm seeking charity. Behind them is their son, and beyond the father their dog holds a tin begging bowl in its mouth.

A couple of years later, in the third of Augustus Leopold Egg’s series Past and Present telling the story of the breakup of a family as the result of the mother’s extra-marital relationship, she is seen homeless, sat among the debris under the arches of one of London’s bridges. She stares wide-eyed and fearful at a star in the sky, cradling a young baby to her, under her thin cloak. Behind her, on the side of the arch, are old posters, one with the word VICTIMS prominent, another advertising excursions to Paris.

Posters have further significance in the intricate details of Ford Madox Brown’s visual essay on Work from 1863.

This crowded street scene is set in Heath Street, Hampstead, one of London’s ‘leafy’ suburbs at the time, into which Brown has crammed references to many aspects of contemporary Victorian society, including an election campaign.

At its centre is a gang of navvies, the term originating from the word navigators, usually Irish labourers, who had dug the canals during the previous century. They’re engaged in digging up a road to lay a sewer as part of the campaign to improve the hygiene of Victorian London. Inspired by the moralising series painted by William Hogarth, Brown is effectively giving a meticulously detailed account of the breadth and depth of contemporary society, using multiple interwoven narratives in this single image.

At the left is a file of people making their way down the pavement. To the rear, heading uphill, is a porter carrying a green case on his head. Next down are two well-dressed women carrying parasols. The woman behind is carrying religious tracts, one of which has floated in front of the navvies, while the woman in front of her represents ‘genteel glamour’. In front is a barefoot flower-seller who lives in a flophouse in Flower and Dean Street in Whitechapel. She is on her way to scrape a living from the wicker basket full of freshly picked wild flowers.

Posters on the wall at the extreme left advocate voting for Bobus, and warn of a man wanted for robbery. Bobus is a character in the writings of Thomas Carlyle who uses ill-gotten gains from his business to sell himself as a politician, one of many links from this painting to contemporary thought.

Although many of the paintings of vagrants made by Augustus Edwin Mulready appear over-sentimental or even disingenuous, and his models are invariably sparklingly clean and well cared-for, some had more worthy messages. His Uncared For from 1871 shows a young girl with exceptionally large brown eyes staring straight at the viewer as she proffers a tiny bunch of violets.

Behind her and her brother are the remains of posters: at the top, The Triumph of Christianity is attributed to the French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré, who illustrated an edition of the Bible in 1866, visited London on several occasions afterwards, and in 1871 produced illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage, published the following year, showing London’s down and outs.

This association between posters in the streets and destitution remained strong, but posters also appeared in other roles.

In Giovanni Battista Quadrone’s witty Every Opportunity is Good (1878), we’re given a detailed look at the painter’s paraphernalia, including several paint bladders on the low table behind the easel, and one on the floor. On the wall at the right, behind the young couple, is a poster showing the anatomy of human muscles, a reassurance that this artist works from an understanding of science.

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema, young wife of the painter Lawrence, was quick to achieve recognition in her work. Her first painting to be exhibited at the Salon in Paris was in 1873, and that same year she started to exhibit at the Royal Academy in London. The Tea Party is undated but recorded as being her seventh painting, and shows the artist’s step-daughter Laurense, playing with her dolls. Behind her are some of the girl’s own drawings, and a poster with a story told in a series of drawings as a storyboard or comic.

Given how common stairs are, they only rarely feature in paintings of interiors, and when they do, they’re usually glimpsed to the side or in the background rather than central to the picture. Stairs are normally constructed of a series of steps, alongside which are one or more rails for the hands to grasp, and to prevent folk from falling over the edge. Supporting that rail are vertical balusters, and together they form a balustrade or banisters.

I’ve recently shown William Frederick Yeames’ painting of the death of Amy Robsart (1877) in suspicious circumstances. On the morning of 8 September 1560, when staying at a country house near Oxford, she dismissed all her servants, and was later found dead, as shown here, with a broken neck at the foot of the stairs. In the gloom above her body is Anthony Forster, one of her husband’s men, leading his manservant down the stairs when they discover Amy’s body. Was he the cause?

A few artists have used stairs for portraits of children.

Briton Rivière’s Sympathy, from about 1878, shows a girl who has been sent to sit at the top of the stairs in disgrace, as her pet dog comforts her. The steps themselves are carpeted, and beside her is a heavy wooden balustrade. At the top of the flight is a closed door, its key dangling on a chain.

Olga Boznańska’s Portrait of Two Children on the Stairs (1898) shows siblings dressed in matching smocks, sat on a bare wooden staircase with a decorative wrought iron balustrade.

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s undated Girl on Stairs has just descended this narrow winding staircase and is about to emerge from the doorway at its foot.

The most compact type of stairway short of a ladder is constructed in a spiral, with early examples dating back to around 400 BCE. These came to flourish in town houses of the Dutch Golden Age.

Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Meditation from 1632 shows their sinuous curves seemingly defying gravity as they rise to the storey above.

Isaac Koedijck shows another early example in his Surgeon Tending a Peasant’s Foot (1649-50), although these seem even more impossible.

Over two centuries later, spiral stairs appeared in one of Edgar Degas’ early paintings of ballet dancers.

Degas’ Dance Class from about 1873 is an elaborately composed example of the works that were to make up half his total output. It shows well his meticulous draughtsmanship, and the strange effect of ballet dress in apparently dismembering the dancers, who become head, arms and legs with a white blur of chiffon between. This is most intense in the tangle of legs making their way down the spiral stairs at the upper left, and in the group of dancers just to the right of those. Like many modern spiral stairs, these are built of wedge-shaped steps known as winders joined in a central column, and probably cast in iron.

Grand buildings deserve grand stairs, as shown in Louis Béroud’s early painting of The Staircase of the Opéra Garnier (1877).

Finally, stairs are a recurrent feature of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s series of prints of an Imaginary Prison.

The Round Tower is the first plate in the first edition, with its fearsome Gothic flights of stairs.