John Singer Sargent’s move to London in 1886 had proved a commercial success, and he painted portraits of the rich and famous until he closed his studio there in 1907.

His group portrait of The Ladies Alexandra, Mary, and Theo Acheson, normally simply known as The Acheson Sisters, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1902, where it was both very popular and favourably received. And at first sight, it is indeed a delight, as they sit around the front of a huge urn decorated with floral garlands, one of the ladies reaching up to pick oranges from a tree just above the urn. Even the late Queen Victoria would, I am sure, have approved. However, there are hidden references that link back through earlier portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds to Nicolas Poussin’s previous paintings of bacchanalian orgies.

Meanwhile, the other John Singer Sargent continued his travels across Europe and beyond. A visit to Venice in 1902 brought this stunning watercolour of Rio dell Angelo, where he provides his response to the Impressionists’ question on the colour of shadows.

The same year, Sargent visited New York, where he painted this portrait of his friend and fellow artist William Merritt Chase in his fifties. He’s immaculately dressed with a carnation in his button-hole, and the tools of his art in hand.

The following year, Sargent was back in Venice to paint this watercolour of Scuola di San Rocco assembled from a virtuoso series of marks and gestural strokes of the brush.

When he broke free of his studio for the summer of 1904, Sargent travelled to the Alps for his first season of serious plein air painting there. He stayed in the Italian mountain town of Purtud, to the south-west of Mont Blanc, where there was a group of Italian artists doing the same thing. Among them was Ambrogio Raffele (1845-1928), probably the best and most experienced of the group; Sargent became particularly friendly with him, and in An Artist in His Studio (1904) shows Raffele at work in his room there.

This painting is a paradox, in that Sargent shows an accomplished plein air painter working not in front of his motif, but in his bedroom. It’s plausible that Raffele is painting a larger version of the small sketch seen at the lower left of the large canvas.

When he reached Venice, Sargent’s watercolours became even more gestural, as shown in this view of Unloading Boats in Venice (1904).

The following summer Sargent turned his attention to his fellow travellers as they crossed the Alps on their way south. He sketched his friends during their siesta, in this Group with Parasols painted in oils in about 1905.

Here they are again in watercolour, in Siesta from the same year.

A decade after her dancing career had gone into decline, and fifteen years after his first painting of her, Sargent produced a completely different portrait of La Carmencita (c 1905). Now his virtuoso brushstrokes capture her motion. His inspiration was no longer Manet, but Giovanni Boldini and his ‘swish’.

In further time out of his studio, Sargent travelled to North Africa, where he painted this Bedouin Camp in 1905-6.

This portrait of an Arab Woman from 1905-06 is another fine example of his watercolour sketching.

At times, Sargent’s brushstrokes appear so casual that it’s almost as if he was just doodling with pigment, as in the blue shadows In a Levantine Port (1905-6). But they coalesce into the image that Sargent clearly had in his mind all the way along, and pop out at the viewer.

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.