Originally known as a toilet table, or simply a toilet, dressing tables or vanities featured near the beds of ladies from the late seventeenth century. They are a fusion of storage boxes used for cosmetics and jewellery, a small flat surface on which to place their contents, and the inevitable mirror to check that she looked right. By the eighteenth century they were made popular by royal mistresses including the Marquise de Pompadour, and became integrated into the morning reception phase of the lady’s day.

William Hogarth even titles the fourth painting in his moralising narrative series Marriage A-la-Mode, The Toilette (c 1743). The Countess Squander is being entertained while completing her dressing and preparations for the day. To the right of the Countess, Silvertongue rests at ease, his feet uncouthly laid on the sofa, clearly intimate with her. He is offering her a ticket to a masquerade ball, where no doubt he will meet her. His left hand gestures towards a painted screen showing such a masquerade.

At the left an Italian castrato (by his wig and jewellery) sings to a flute accompaniment. The rest of the room are disinterested, apart from a woman in white, who is swooning at the singer. The Countess’s bedchamber is behind the pale red drapes at the rear left, and to the right of centre is a typical dressing table with a mirror.

Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate’s Chaperone (1858) recreates an interior from a similar period. A suitor clutching his tricorn hat and walking stick is chatting up a young woman with her companion and moral guard. Behind her chair is a dressing table with a similar layout to Hogarth’s.

Over the next century, dressing tables were modernised and adopted by even the middle classes.

Edgar Degas’ Woman Drying Herself after the Bath is one his first works showing a woman bathing, dating from 1876-77. It’s also one of the few in this series setting the woman in a broader context, here a plain and simple bedroom with a single bed. The woman, wearing only bright red ‘mule’ slippers, stands just behind the shallow metal tub, watching herself in the mirror of her dressing table, as she dries her body with a towel. On its shelf is a small range of cosmetics, with the mandatory mirror behind.

Félix Vallotton affords us a glimpse into the private life of one of the most influential patrons and muses of the day, in his Misia at Her Dressing Table from 1898. Her first marriage was to her cousin Thadée Natanson, who had socialist ideals and lived in artistic circles. The Natansons entertained Marcel Proust, Stéphane Mallarmé, André Gide, and Claude Debussy, but they were closest to their painter friends: Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Odilon Redon, Paul Signac, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

For Frederick Carl Frieseke a Nude Seated at Her Dressing Table (1909) is an opportunity for mirror-play. This vanity is more decorative than functional, with curves, a glass top and a painted porcelain figure.

Pierre Bonnard’s domestic interiors are rich with dressing tables, and inventive mirror-play. I show here just two examples.

In Bonnard’s El Tocador, which means The Dressing Table (1908), his partner Marthe’s headless torso is seen only in reflection. The direct view is of the large bowl and pitcher she used to wash herself.

In 1914, Bonnard moved back for a wider view in The Bathroom Mirror. Marthe’s reflection is now but a small image within the image, showing her sat on the side of the bed, with a bedspread matching the red floral pattern of the drapes around her dressing table. Bonnard has worked his usual vanishing trick for himself, and a vertical mirror at the right adds a curiously dark reflection of the room.

Henry Tonks’ The Toilet from the same year separates his nude from her dressing table, and shuns mirror-play altogether.

Félix Vallotton’s Coquèterie (Sauciness) from 1911 shows a young woman still undressed in her white chemise, her unmade bed behind. She looks at herself in the mirror of a small dressing table with that mirror mounted in its lift-up lid, thinking what clothing she should wear from those scattered around.

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.

Not content with adorning the walls of their mansions with paintings, some of the nobility covered them with tapestries, for which artists like Francisco Goya were employed to create cartoons. They were expensive, and those who still aspired to fortunes used wallpaper instead. That could be hand-painted, or more usually printed, and became sufficiently popular by the time of Oliver Cromwell in the middle of the seventeenth century to be a bone of contention with his Puritan government.

During the eighteenth century, Britain became the largest manufacturer of wallpaper in Europe, largely because it lacked the tapestry factories that had been established for other royal courts, and for the period 1712-1836 England even had a wallpaper tax.

Because paper could only be produced in relatively small sheets, early wallpaper had to be assembled from many of those. For example, Albrecht Dürer’s woodblock print of The Triumphal Arch for the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I in 1516-1518, required a total of 195 woodblocks printed onto 36 separate sheets of paper.

Wallpaper came of age and appeared on the walls of many more homes when paper could be produced in long rolls using the Fourdrinier process in the early nineteenth century.

The first of Augustus Egg’s narrative series Past and Present from 1858 shows an ordinary middle-class drawing room, with a deep-coloured heavily patterned wallpaper typical of this Victorian setting.

In Edgar Degas’ famously enigmatic Interior from 1868-69, the wallpaper is lighter and floral, matching the pattern on the lampshade, and making an association with the woman.

This exquisite wallpaper designed by Édouard Muller in 1854 is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, its five long rolls forming a trompe l’oeil of this enchanted garden from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered. Trompe l’oeils like this became popular, and have their origins in frescos painted on the walls of Roman villas in classical times. While a fresco was a costly one-off, improvements in printing made such wallpapers more widely available in the later nineteenth century.

Camille Pissarro painted a few delightful still lifes, among them this Still Life: Apples and Pears in a Round Basket from 1872, which ingeniously adds floating flowers from the wallpaper in its background.

Gustave Caillebotte’s portrait of Mademoiselle Boissière Knitting from 1877 is one of the first in which he might be said to be painting in Impressionist style. Its east Asian inspired wallpaper is typical of increasingly popular designs of that period.

Harold Gilman’s early Edwardian Interior from about 1907 shows the drawing room of his family home in the Rectory at Snargate, with the artist’s youngest sister as model. This wallpaper has a more complex design to make it appear less regular.

Wallpapers in the home of Pierre Bonnard make cameo appearances in several of his paintings, and usually feature bold stripes of colour, as seen in his famous Bowl of Milk from 1919. Although it looks informal if not spontaneous, this painting is the result of deliberate compositional work, and attention to details such as the form of the pillars on the balcony outside. In its informality is formality, in the model’s pose, the layout of the table settings, and the echoing verticals in the window and wallpaper.

When Édouard Vuillard painted his mother Madame Vuillard Sewing in 1920, he returned to a more Nabi style, and a wallpaper with a simple and bold pattern.

Further into the twentieth century, even bolder patterns appear in some of Eric Ravilious’ interiors, such as this Farmhouse Bedroom from 1939.

Although of ancient origin, in Europe the idea of laying carpet on the floor is surprisingly recent. Woven and backed textiles resembling modern carpets appear to have originated in the Caucasian area and in Anatolia, and first made their way to western Europe with the Crusades. It was another seven centuries before Europeans realised they weren’t only intended to be hung from walls or placed on tables. Their wider adoption as floor coverings may have been limited by the difficulties in cleaning by beating them outdoors.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Carpet Merchant (of Cairo) from 1887 shows a contemporary trading scene in almost photographic detail. Standing on and among crumpled up carpets in this corner of a souk is a group of traders and their customers, admiring one particularly fine example hanging from a balcony as they haggle over price. As an image within an image, Gérôme paints the calligraphic design of the carpet in painstaking detail.

You could easily mistake Georges Rochegrosse’s undated Palace Entertainment for another by his contemporary Gérôme, although by this time (the period 1894-1914) Rochegrosse was often far more painterly in his style. It shows a dancer with musical group entertaining some Algerian men, her routine involving a pair of short swords. Under her feet is a large and brilliant scarlet carpet.

Carpets were also in widespread use as floor coverings throughout Turkey and the Middle East, as shown in Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting of Reciting the Quran from 1910. At its foot is a wonderful deep blue carpet.

In Philip Hermogenes Calderon’s “Lord, Thy Will Be Done” from 1855, the small and threadbare piece of carpet tells you more about this young mother’s financial and social status than any other object in the room.

Among the early depictions of floor carpets is James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s chinoiserie interior painted in 1863-65, which might give rise to geographical confusion.

Whistler’s The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, is shown above and in the detail below. The model’s features are European rather than Oriental (she was actually from an Italian family), but she’s wearing a fine silk kimono and holding a fan. Behind her is a painted screen from Japan, and under her feet is a lush white and blue carpet.

This is the painting at the focal point of the lavish dining room of the London house of Frederick Richards Leyland, a shipping magnate. Whistler and Leyland fell out over changes the artist made to the original design, and Whistler was forced into bankruptcy as a result. The contents of the room were purchased in 1904, moved to the USA, and exhibited in the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC, from 1923.

In Giovanni Boldini’s Peaceful Days (The Music Lesson) from 1875, a younger boy sits on a vividly decorated carpet studying an epée, with a cello behind him. Judging by their dress and surroundings, these two are at least comfortably off, and certainly well-carpeted.

There’s also something indulgent and sensuous about lying back on an exotic carpet, in the way that this woman is in John William Waterhouse’s Dolce Far Niente or The White Feather Fan (1879). She’s plucking feathers from the fan and watching them rise through the air, a perfect way to while away the time, it seems.

William Merritt Chase’s paintings of his studio acted as a shop window for prospective customers. In his Studio Interior from about 1882, a fashionably dressed young woman is glancing through a huge bound collation of Chase’s work, sat by a grand carved wooden sideboard, decorated with almost outlandish objects including a model ship, a lute, and sundry objets d’art. Under her feet is a wonderful blue carpet, no doubt ready to transport her into the scenes shown in Chase’s book.

By the turn of the century, and Félix Vallotton’s disturbing domestic scenes such as Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures (1904), the prosperous were having wall-to-wall carpets fitted in their houses. The lady of the house is standing on a patterned carpet that runs under the bed, and at the left extends to the wall.

Colours and patterns soon became vibrant if not gaudy.

In Pierre Bonnard’s Nude in Bathtub from about 1938-41, the flooring dazzles, and Marthe’s brown dog has its own mat.

Eric Ravilious’ Farmhouse Bedroom (1939) overwhelms the viewer with the patterns in its flooring that contradict rather than complement its walls.

This weekend we’re seeking refuge from the winter in Saint-Tropez on the Côte d’Azur, in the company of some of the artists who painted its warm light. By 1897 it had good connections by express trains to Paris, and Paul Signac had just bought a house in the old port and moved there with his wife. Although Théo van Rysselberghe didn’t move to the coast until he retired in 1911, he was a frequent visitor.

Their friend Maximilien Luce had first visited Saint-Tropez in 1892 with Signac, and continued to travel south despite remaining based in Paris until his death there in 1941.

Luce became skilled in colour lithography. His finest print is this of Saint-Tropez from 1897. Here he substitutes dashes of colour for the small dots of Pointillist painting, with the aim of getting adjacent colours to interact and generate a glow of colour. This is taken from Divisionist theory as first developed by Seurat, then later by Signac.

That year, Paul Signac painted this unusual view of Saint-Tropez. Route de la Foux, also known as Golfe Juan, (1897). This looks back at Saint-Tropez from the main road running west towards Port Cogolin at the end of the Gulf of Saint-Tropez. Visible to the left is Saint-Tropez lighthouse, and its bell tower in the centre.

Signac started painting Saint-Tropez. The Terrace on 16 August 1898, aiming to complete it about ten days later. It shows his wife Berthe on the Italianate terrace that they had built at their house La Hune. It looks north, over vineyards and the old town of Saint-Tropez with its distinctive bell tower, the small bay beyond, to the Maures hills in the distance. The artist envisaged the lone figure being a young woman in the sunset of her life as one of the many victims of tuberculosis.

Although Signac started work on this view of the port of Saint-Tropez in 1901, he didn’t complete it until early the following year. At its centre is the bell tower, and the citadel looks down from its upper right. Its Tartane sailing vessels are being loaded with their cargo of barrels. Although its Divisionist technique and colours are thoroughly contemporary, it harks back to a tradition of port views by Claude Lorrain and Joseph Vernet.

The Harbour Entrance, Saint-Tropez from about 1902 appears to be one of Signac’s oil sketches with some colour tiling in the water.

Saint-Tropez, Tartanes in the Port from 1905 is one of the many watercolours Signac painted of these distinctive Tartanes in the harbour of Saint-Tropez, with its prominent lighthouse in the background.

Maximilien Luce continued to visit the Mediterranean coast of France, where he painted these Bathers at Saint-Tropez in about 1909. His colours are considerably less brash and dazzling than other former Neo-Impressionists like Théo van Rysselberghe.

Signac’s Saint-Tropez, Boat being Careened from 1920 is an unusual watercolour of a boat that has been deliberately grounded alongside the quay, to allow maintenance to be performed on its hull. As a longstanding yachtsman he had considerable insight into this procedure.

Pierre Bonnard began to visit the Côte d’Azur long before he started moving to Le Cannet in 1924, and went sailing in the Mediterranean with Paul Signac. Bonnard painted this view of an almost deserted Port of Saint-Tropez on a breezy day, with small wavelets forming on the water surface. The mole at the right ends in a lighthouse, which merges visually with the sailing ship’s superstructure.

Paul Signac painted this view of boats at low tide alongside Saint-Tropez, the Pier on 21 December 1923. Even with Spring tides, the tidal range at Saint-Tropez is little more than 30 cm (1 foot), suggesting these boats have been deliberately beached alongside the pier.

During the 1920s Saint-Tropez became the most fashionable resort in Europe when it drew Coco Chanel and a host of other celebrities. Later in the twentieth century it attained fame again as a ‘topless’ beach resort despite its mayor ordering its police helicopter to check that sunbathers were correctly dressed, and ‘clothing fights’ broke out with the police. I hope you have enjoyed this weekend, whatever you were not wearing in Saint-Tropez.

For those who had arrived from the country, towns and cities were alien places. This article shows a selection of paintings of the ordinary parts where the common people lived and worked.

The city of Paris was substantially redeveloped by Georges-Eugène Haussmann during the middle of the nineteenth century, but his wide boulevards only displaced common people into cramped slums in other areas. Montmartre, for instance, wasn’t incorporated into the city until 1860, and in 1871 was the source of the uprising that became the Paris Commune.

Pierre Bonnard’s Rue Tholozé or Montmartre in the Rain (1897) shows one of the streets at the heart of Montmartre, not far from the famous Sacré-Coeur. Seen from the third or fourth floor, it’s a grey and wet evening in which the lights of the windows provide a pervasive warm glow.

Bonnard’s Narrow Street in Paris (c 1897) is an aerial view of a bustling backstreet.

George Bellows’ famous Cliff Dwellers (1913) shows the largely immigrant population of tenements in Lower East Side of New York City. Washing was hung out to dry on ropes strung between their wooden balconies.

Colin Campbell Cooper’s Columbus Circle from 1909 shows the interaction of jumbled buildings, light, smoke, and steam. With Gaetano Russo’s landmark statue of Christopher Columbus just to the right of centre, the circle had only been completed in 1905, as part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for Central Park, off to the right. In the foreground, Cooper shows some of the more intimate sights of this new elevated world, with a woman hanging out her washing amid the chimneys.

Many cities grew around heavy industries, such as Charleroi in the Black Country of Belgium.

Maximilien Luce’s Slag-Heaps of Sacré Madame from 1897 is perhaps a unique view of this city. Slag heaps or spoil tips were an inevitable sight in coal-mining country. They’re formed from the spoil or waste removed from underground, and don’t contain slag, the by-products of metal smelting. Mining spoil is frequently toxic, and can result in disastrous landslides.

Few cities enjoyed the cleaner air that most do today. In London, in particular, ‘smogs’ composed of a toxic mixture of smoke and fog caused the deaths of many thousands each winter. It wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that any effort was made to reduce smoke emissions from industry and domestic heating.

Frits Thaulow’s The Smoke from 1898 shows a suburb overwhelmed by smoke, with houses crammed up against factory walls. Few cities enforced any separation between industrial areas and housing, and there were no restrictions on the discharge of smoke even in densely populated zones.

Alfred Roll’s undated sketch of A Large Town of Smoke probably dates from the same period.

Whereas the French Impressionists gave small glimpses of smoke billowing from the chimneys of factories sprawling out around Paris, Maximilien Luce painted Industrial City in 1899, again probably around Charleroi.

The largest employer in the German city of Dortmund was its steelworks, founded in 1871. In 1905, Eugen Bracht painted this Impressionist view of the Hoesch Steelworks from the North, with its tall chimneys and their plumes of acrid smoke.

Two years later, Bracht returned to paint the Hoesch Iron and Steel Plant, Dortmund (1907).

Constantin Meunier painted in the Borinage, another mining area to the west of Charleroi in Belgium. His undated Black Country – Borinage shows the area where Vincent van Gogh lived between 1878-80, then one of the major coal mining areas in Europe. The tower at the left is the pit head, where trucks of freshly cut coal were brought to the surface.

Meunier’s Coron, Women having a Chat gives insight into the close communities in these areas, and shows the main drain running down the middle of the street. Coron refers to the local housing of the working class in northern France and Belgium, the equivalent of Britain’s back-to-back miners’ cottages.

The Pile Drivers (1902-3) is one of Luce’s explorations of the working life of the common man in Paris. Construction work in the French capital continued to be active well into the early twentieth century, and Luce painted its many facets. The factories on the opposite bank have infiltrated surrounding residential and commercial districts, only to fill the air with plumes of smoke.

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.

In the first of these two articles visiting the Tuileries Gardens in central Paris, I showed paintings known to have been made before the Communards burned the Tuileries Palace in 1871, and those up to Monet’s views of 1876. As a result of damage to the palace, it was demolished in 1883, leaving the space it had occupied to become an extension to the garden.

Today the Tuileries retains two substantial buildings: the Jeu de Paume and Musée de l’Orangerie, both at the Place de la Concorde end and almost surrounded by terraces. Its broad Grande Allée joins the massive Arc de Triomphe with its smaller sister, the Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel, by the Louvre. Depending on the season, the gardens may be busy with runners, noisy with childrens’ amusements, or a well of relative calm amid the rumbling rush of Paris and its traffic.

Although Gaston de La Touche’s A Water Fountain in the Tuileries is undated, from its style it was painted after 1891, when he burned most of his earlier works and switched to this brighter style that could pass for Impressionism. Human figures are here, but dark, vague and subjugate to the jet of water in the fountain, the trees and the Louvre Palace behind. La Touche appears to have painted many fountains, and this may have been intended to form part of a series of such views.

Theodor von Hörmann’s undated In the Tuileries appears to be a brisk plein air sketch made in the late summer or early autumn. The child in the foreground is playing with a hoop.

The Tuileries Gardens, Paris (1895) may have been painted shortly before Maurice Brazil Prendergast left the city to return to Boston. While he was in Paris he met Édouard Vuillard, whose influence appears to have extended to his use of colour here, and Pierre Bonnard, an addicted sketcher of street scenes in Paris.

Childe Hassam’s Tuileries Gardens from about 1897 is an early work in Impressionist style, with visible facture and textbook linear perspective. Its gestural figures are skilfully executed, giving the viewer just sufficient detail to be able to distinguish different types of hats, for instance. This American Impressionist studied in Paris at the Académie Julian.

At the end of 1898, Camille Pissarro rented a flat for his family in Paris, from where he enjoyed a superb view over the Tuileries Gardens, which, unlike Monet and Renoir, he hadn’t painted until late in his career. His first series of eleven paintings was sold to Durand-Ruel in May for the sum of 27,000 Francs. The artist then returned to the same flat to paint a second series at the end of 1899.

These two versions of The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon (1899), above and below, are composed almost identically to Monet’s view from nearly 25 years earlier, with the dome of Les Invalides and the spires of the Church of Saint-Clotilde in the background. Pissarro was perhaps the first to capture the appearance of the gardens when busy, as they are during fine weather even in winter. His crowds of people are as varied and minimalist as those in his other series paintings of Paris.

Pissarro’s Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning from the same year is a similar aerial view, this time well into springtime, with the trees in full leaf, in their brilliant fresh green foliage. Although there are fewer people now, Pissarro affords us some delicate detail, for instance in the pram just above the middle of the lower edge of the canvas.

There are subtle differences between these three canvases demonstrating that Pissarro’s painting was far from mechanical, and involved significant interpretation. The spring view has a lower skyline that cannot be accounted for by its being angled more to the left than the winter views, for example. However details of trees and even quite small features in the distance match well, supporting the view that he did remain faithful to the real world.

Judging by the brown foliage in the trees in The Tuileries Garden (1905), Pierre Bonnard painted this view in the autumn. The rich array of statuary stands out well.

The Tuileries Gardens (1910) is one of Jean-François Raffaëlli’s colour engravings of the gardens, in a formal view. It’s easy to see how Degas’ enthusiasm for Raffaëlli’s work to be included in Impressionist exhibitions was so divisive. Although popular at the time, it wasn’t in the least Impressionist, and now seems perhaps a little anachronistic.

Finally, Pierre Thévenet’s The Tuileries Gardens in Autumn from 1922 is unique among these paintings in being completely unpopulated, and shows some of the trees during leaf-fall, with their rich colours, and the Louvre in the background. Thévenet was a Belgian Post-Impressionist who lived and worked in Paris from 1919, painting many views of the city.