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.

The most famous French person, born a Corsican of Italian origin, who died on the British South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, was the Emperor Napoleon I. His life, battles, wives and descendants have been painted repeatedly by some of the great artists of the nineteenth century, from Girodet to JMW Turner. This weekend I show a few of those images of greatness and downfall.

Napoleon Bonaparte rose rapidly through the French army following the French Revolution of 1789, until he became its commander for the campaign against Austria and Italy in 1796.

About a century later, Georges Clairin’s painting of Napoleon’s Troops in Front of San Marco, Venice provides a biased gloss on the fall of the Venetian Republic to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797. The French occupation around 4 June may itself have been relatively peaceful, but by the end of July had been declared a siege, with the arrest and imprisonment of many Venetians. Later in the year, the French plundered the city of many of its artworks, something that Clairin seems to have overlooked.

As a national hero, Napoleon and his army travelled on to invade Egypt and Syria in 1798.

In 1806, Napoleon commissioned Pierre-Narcisse Guérin to paint for the Gallery of Diana in the Tuileries Palace. The result was Napoleon Bonaparte Pardoning the Rebels at Cairo, 23rd October 1798, completed in 1808.

Napoleon had taken the French army into Egypt in 1798, and conquered Alexandria and Cairo. On 21 October, the citizens of Cairo organised an uprising, and murdered the French commander and Napoleon’s aide-de-camp. The French fought back with artillery, then the cavalry fought their way back into the city, forcing the rebels out into the desert, or into the Great Mosque. Napoleon brought his artillery to bear on the mosque, following which his troops stormed the building, killing or wounding over five thousand. With control restored over Cairo, the leaders of the revolt were hunted down and executed. Following this, the city was taxed heavily in punishment, and put under military rule.

Guérin’s painting shows a very different event, in which Napoleon is engaged in open discourse with the rebels. However, the presence of French cavalry behind the Egyptians, and the action taking place at the far right, suggests the truth behind this ‘pardon’.

In 1810, Girodet painted the only reasonably accurate account of The Revolt of Cairo of 21 October 1798 and Napoleon’s massacre of the city’s residents. Most were killed when French cannons fired at the Al-Azhar Mosque where they were seeking refuge. This is a late oil sketch for the finished painting.

Léon Cogniet was also called to document Napoleon’s empire, painting his Bonaparte’s 1798 Egyptian Expedition (1835) on a ceiling in the Louvre Palace, as an explanation of how so many Egyptian artefacts came to be in Paris, ironically now on display in that same building.

Jean-Léon Gérôme made several paintings showing Napoleon in Egypt, including this highly detailed and intricate version of General Bonaparte and his Staff in Egypt from 1867.

In November 1799, Napoleon used these military victories to engineer a coup and became First Consul of the French Republic.

In early 1800, Napoleon made moves to reinforce French troops in Italy, so they could repossess territory lost to the Austrians in recent years. Leading his Reserve Army, he crossed the Alps via the Great St Bernard Pass in May, and his troops fought their first battle at Montebello on 9 June. Paul Delaroche was commissioned to paint a faithful account of this. His Napoleon Crossing the Alps from 1850 does at least sit the First Consul astride a mule, the only mount capable of carrying him in these conditions, but it’s still a good way from the truth. Napoleon’s face is bare, his left hand uncovered and resting on the pommel of his saddle, and he’s wearing a thin cloak and thin riding breeches.

In 1803, Napoleon sold the French territory of Louisiana to the United States, and at the end of the following year crowned himself Emperor of the French, giving him near-absolute power.

Among the paintings of François Flameng showing the Napoleonic period, one of the most striking is this scene of Napoleon Hunting in the Forest of Fontainebleau, in which the pack is closing in on a cornered stag as the sun sets.

At about this time, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s paintings became appreciated by the emperor’s court, and Napoleon himself. He was thus commissioned to paint the Empress Joséphine. Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, as she was before marrying the Emperor in late 1804, must have been forty-one or forty-two years old at the time of Prud’hon’s commission, and a widow with two children. Most unconventionally, it must have been agreed that she wouldn’t be portrayed in her official role of Empress.

Prud’hon’s black chalk Study for a Portrait of Empress Joséphine, from 1805, perhaps shows the original concept of the Empress in her role as patron of the arts, complete with a lyre, reclining on the coast, against a background of trees.

His finished painting of The Empress Joséphine (c 1805) dispenses with the lyre and seats her on a stone bench in woodland, looking pensive if not slightly wistful.

But Joséphine failed to become pregnant by Napoleon, and four years later he informed her that he had to find a wife who could provide him with an heir.

The world still looks to Paris for the height of fashion in clothing, a phenomenon already well-established by the late nineteenth century. This of course included hats, and in this second article on the reading of hats in paintings, I show a selection of works illustrating fashionable headwear of that period. These are the works of just five painters who seem, in one way or another, to have specialised in fashionable women’s headwear: Georges Clairin, Jean Béraud, Pierre-Georges Jeanniot, Henri Gervex and Edgar Degas.

Georges Clairin’s undated Elegant Couple at the Coast comes not from the Rococo, but as indicated by the painterly style of the slippery rocks, was most probably painted in the early years of the twentieth century. It’s a study of one of the few disadvantages of hats, particularly extensive fashionable adornments, in their behaviour in wind. The very pink young galante woman is a textbook example of how to make a figure look windswept, although her partner seems mysteriously to be unaffected by the breeze.

The English word for specialists in fashionable hats for women, milliner, comes from that for an inhabitant of Milan, one of the former centres of the hat trade in Europe. Milliners and their shops were associated with the height of fashion, and drew the attention of Edgar Degas among others.

Degas looked carefully at one of the delights of the middle and upper class modern woman, the selection of hats in The Millinery Shop (1879/86). Here he also experiments with unusual views and cropping, as he examines the tricky process of assessing and choosing a hat.

Around this fashionably-dressed Milliner on the Champs Elysées, Jean Béraud carefully balances painterly background foliage and sky, and the atmospheric detail of distant carriages. His Milliner on the Pont des Arts from 1879-82 (below) shows the same model drawing admiring looks on a windy day by the River Seine.

Pierre-Georges Jeanniot’s At the Milliner (1901) contrasts with those of Degas in its relatively fine detail, and his use of mirror play to show the milliner herself, at the right. His swirling hats, and the huge ginger cat, are marvellous.

Millinery was one of the staples of fashion houses like that of Paquin, whose success was characteristic of the late nineteenth century, and shown in Henri Gervex’s Five Hours at Paquin’s from 1906.

The purpose of these expensive hand-made hats was for show, when the lady was seen in appropriate surroundings. Jeanniot’s painting of the patrons of one of the most fashionable hotels in Paris shows all the hats out on parade in the fine weather in the inner garden of the Paris Ritz.

Others captured the role of hats to those heading downward through society.

In Béraud’s The Letter (1908) the man looks rough and is unshaven, although the woman is elegantly dressed, and apparently engaged in writing a letter. In front of each of them is a glass of absinthe, notorious for its association with alcoholism. His battered old brown bowler hat suggests a working past before he succumbed to drink.

Although I’ve concentrated almost exclusively on hats seen in Europe on the head of Europeans, the nineteenth century was also a time when hats from overseas were becoming more frequent sights.

Georges Clairin’s paintings of Ouled Naïl women provide glimpses of those from this nomadic group from the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Exotic they certainly are, with elaborate headwear, richly decorated clothing, and no doubt over their identity.

Of all the artists of this period, it was Clairin who appears to have been most fascinated by hats.

His extraordinary Bust of a Woman in Profile (1899) is perhaps a sea-nymph, wearing the most bizarre headgear that appears to have grown from coral. It has peculiar pedicles which sweep over her hair, and excrescences resembling the bodies of fabulous birds, making it the ultimate hat of them all.