The overwhelming majority of paintings of interiors show rooms we might aspire to. In this last of the series, I show some we’d all hope to avoid, those of the poor and destitute. Although never really popular as motifs, there have always been a few artists prepared to tackle the ills and inequalities in society, and this became increasingly frequent in the 1880s.

In common with other paintings of inns in the Dutch Golden Age, David Teniers the Younger’s The Dice Shooters (1630-50) is set in a dingy room in a rough tavern. Drawing on their clay pipes and with glasses of beer in hand, a group of men appear completely absorbed in gambling their large stacks of coins on the throw of their dice.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is one of the earliest artists to have paid particular attention to the poor. The Young Beggar, painted in about 1645, shows a young boy squatting in a tiny bare nook in a building. By his filthy feet is a bag full of rotting fruit, and some sort of worms, which apparently form his diet.

François-Auguste Biard’s undated sketchy view In a Mountain Hut may have been made in front of the motif, onto paper. This is unusually social realist for this artist, showing the abject poverty and spartan conditions of many who lived in the more remote areas of France at that time.

It was the Naturalist paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage in the early 1880s that brought depictions of the poor to success in the Salon.

Typical of his portraits is The Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers), one of his last paintings, completed in 1883. This young chimneysweep sitting in his tiny hovel with a stray cat and kitten has the air of authenticity. The hand grasping that slab of bread is still black with soot. Bastien painted this in his home village in northern France.

Antonino Gandolfo’s Compensation (1880-85) depicts prostitution in the city of Catania on the east coast of the island of Sicily, Italy. The man settling his bill is only seen by his hand holding out money, and a foot. The young woman holding out her hand to receive looks away in shame, and wears scarlet to advertise her trade.

We remain in the poor quarter of Catania for Gandolfo’s The Last Coin (c 1880-85). A young woman, who has been spinning, sits on an old chest and takes the last money from her purse, presumably to pay for some milk to fill her blue and white jug. Her family stand with their heads bowed in the gloom behind.

Vincent van Gogh’s early paintings of Nuenen, such as The Potato Eaters from April 1885, depict poor peasant families, here eating inside their dingy cottage lit by a single oil lamp.

Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888 shows a pair of charitable bourgeois ladies arriving at the hovel that is home to a young mother and her small child. Beside the woman, on a small table under the window, are a couple of bottles of her favourite ‘poison’, quite likely absinthe.