Folding screens were first recorded in ancient China, where they were used as portable room dividers and as decorative furniture. They’re thought to have made their way to Europe in the late Middle Ages, and started to spread more widely during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Early screens were made of wood, but were soon covered with painted paper or silk. Kanō Hideyori’s magnificent Maple Viewers (紙本著色観楓図) (Muromachi, early 1500s) is painted on paper in the classical style of the Kanō school, then applied to a six-section folding screen.

In Europe, screens served several purposes in addition to dividing a larger space into two. They could be used to keep drafts away, provide privacy, hide a feature like a servant’s entrance to a kitchen, or purely for decoration.

In the fourth painting in William Hogarth’s moralising narrative series Marriage A-la-Mode, The Toilette (c 1743), Countess Squander is being entertained while completing her dressing and preparations for the day. In the background at the right is a painted screen showing a masquerade ball.

It was the popularity of East Asian artefacts in the latter half of the nineteenth century that put folding screens in many homes and quite a few paintings. They featured in at least two of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s works from the mid-1860s.

Behind Whistler’s Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, is a painted screen from Japan.

A more elaborately painted screen forms the backdrop to Whistler’s Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen from 1864.

Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti’s The Duet (1870) attracted favourable reviews when exhibited at the Royal Academy. This features a decorated folding screen from East Asia in the left background. The artist was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, and was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sister-in-law.

In 1872 William Quiller-Orchardson completed Dolce Far Niente, incorporating in its painted screen a contemporary flavour of Japonisme. His woman, dressed in sober black, reclines on a thoroughly European chaise longue, her open book and fan beside her as she stares idly out of an unseen window.

Like other artists of the day, Elihu Vedder developed a fascination for objets d’art from the Far East, which he assembled in this Japanese Still Life in 1879. This unusual collection may have been assisted by the fact that his brother was a US Navy doctor who was stationed in Japan as it was being re-opened to the West.

Bouderie, which means sulking, is a splendid and intimate portrait of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s friend and colleague Gustave Courtois, painted in 1880. Courtois is seen at one end of a large sofa, smiling wryly and staring into the distance. He holds his palette and brushes in his left hand, and what may be a long mahlstick in the right. At the opposite end of the sofa, turned with her back towards Courtois, is a young woman dressed in fashionable clothing, in black throughout, apart from white lace trim at the foot of her skirts. Also shown is a screen decorated with Japanese imagery, and on the floor the skin of a big cat, perhaps a lioness.

Pierre Bonnard developed his earlier Man and Woman in an Interior into his Man and Woman in about 1900. Marthe isn’t getting dressed here, but sits up in the sunshine. A folded wooden screen divides the painting into two. Bonnard stands at the right edge of the painting, his legs looking skeletal in the sunlight.

William McGregor Paxton’s Tea Leaves (1909) show two well-dressed young women taking tea together. The woman in the blue-trimmed hat seems to be staring into the leaves at the bottom of her cup, a traditional means of fortune-telling, and behind them is a large folding screen, whose details are intentionally blurred and vague.

The New Necklace from the following year is one of 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 to reach behind and hold out her left hand to receive the new necklace from a slightly older woman in a dark blue-green dress. Their backdrop is another folding screen, this time with its East Asian painting clearly visible.

My final screen is the painting itself.

Pierre Bonnard’s exquisite three-panelled Japoniste screen of The Stork and Four Frogs was painted at the outset of his career, in about 1889. Its story is contrastingly European, and based on one of Aesop’s fables retold by Jean de La Fontaine’s The Frogs who Demand a King.

The version retold by La Fontaine centres on a colony of frogs, who ask Jupiter for a king. The god’s first response to their request is a laid-back and gentle leader, whom the frogs reject as being too weak to rule them. Jupiter’s second attempt is a crane, who kills and eats the frogs for his pleasure. When the frogs complain to Jupiter, he then responds that they had better be happy with what they have got this time, or they could be given something even worse. Bonnard’s magnificent panel is traditionally interpreted not as showing the evil crane of the second attempt, but the first and gentle ruler.

The history of clocks is a story of largely unwanted technical capability driven by the requirement for accurate navigation, until the arrival of railways in the middle and late nineteenth century. Until people needed to catch a train run according to a timetable, even towns and cities could proceed at their own pace, and as long as they got the right day, the country could amble along too. Clocks were mostly features of churches and public buildings, and often weren’t even synchronised with the next town. Accordingly, clocks were rare, and were more items of furniture than rulers of the day.

Where they do appear in paintings before the nineteenth century, they’re normally an anachronism.

The title given to this painting by Domenico Maroli from about 1655 is Euclid of Megara Dressing as a Woman to Hear Socrates Teach in Athens, which is baffling enough. Given that Euclid of Megara lived between about 435-365 BCE, the ornate clock at the upper right corner is badly out of time and place. No one is too sure of the time that such clocks first appeared, but it must have been at least 1500 years later.

It gets worse, though. Euclid of Megara was a real figure, a minor Greek philosopher and a pupil of Socrates. He ended up wearing women’s clothing because citizens of Megara were banned from entering Athens, so in order to hear his master’s teaching, he dressed as a woman and entered the city after dark. But Marolì confused that Euclid with the much better-known Euclid of Alexandria, the famous mathematician and geometer, and surrounded the minor philosopher with everything you might associate with the other Euclid, including his anachronistic clock.

When we reach the nineteenth century, clocks feature in remarkably few interiors.

One of the earliest is William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, painted during the period 1851-53. Sat in its glass bell case on the top of the piano it an ornate gilt clock, its face turned away but apparently showing the time as five to twelve.

The fashionable young man seated at the piano in this small house in the leafy suburbs of London is clearly in an extra-marital relationship with the young woman, who has half-risen from his lap and now stares absently into the distance. Around them are signs that she’s a kept mistress with time on her hands. Her companion, a cat, is under the table, where it has caught a bird with a broken wing, a symbol of her plight. At the right edge is a tapestry with which to while away the hours, and her wools below form a tangled web in which she is entwined.

Thomas Brooks’ painting of The New Pupil from 1854 shows a disorderly rabble in an English country school, as a mother introduces her reluctant son to his new class. Behind the teacher, at the left, one the boys reaches up to adjust the time on the pendulum clock on the wall, no doubt moving its hand forward to bring a premature end to classes for the day.

Charles Hunt’s Visit to the Schoolroom from 1859 shows a more impressive educational establishment, with a grandfather clock supervising the class from the middle of the back wall. To the left of it is a barometer, even more unusual in a school at that time.

In Rebecca Solomon’s The Appointment from 1861, a beautiful woman stands in front of a mirror and looks intently at a man, who’s only seen in his reflection and stands in a doorway behind the viewer’s right shoulder. The woman is dressed to go out, and is holding a letter in her gloved hands. The clock on the mantelpiece shows that it’s about thirteen minutes past seven, either on a summer’s evening, or in the morning.

Another splendid longcase clock, of a type known as Comtoise or Morbier, appears in the right background of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s An Accident from 1879. At this time, the factory making them in the Franche-Comté region of France was delivering over sixty thousand of them each year, but they’re unusual in paintings.

Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov’s Russian Preference (1879) shows three players of the game known as ‘Russian Preference’ or Preferans. According to the grandfather clock at the right it’s just after four o’clock, which could be in the afternoon or the small hours of the morning. Cast natural light in the doorway suggests it’s still daylight outside, though, as these three play cards to while away the time.

Like those homes, that in Évariste Carpentier’s undated The Reprimand may lack signs of material wealth but they have given their grandfather clock pride of place in the living room. The son is sat on the corner of a simple table with one of his wooden clogs dropped onto the floor. Dressed in multiply patched clothing, he’s being reprimanded by a figure out of the image, beyond its left edge. His mother stands preparing food to the right, and his grandmother sits at the table. Even the family’s black and white dog faces towards the wall, as if in disgrace.

Long before the days of radio let alone television, reading became popular entertainment. LA Ring’s Housewife’s Evening Party from 1905 shows a very different sort of party from those being painted at the time in cities like Paris. This housewife sits knitting, as her husband and a friend discuss a book by the light of the kerosene lantern. They aren’t poor by any means: there are portrait paintings on the wall, and a clock ticking softly above them, showing the time as seventeen minutes to eight.

During the twentieth century, mantelpiece clocks became almost universal, as timekeeping became the rule rather than an exception, but longcase clocks grew increasingly rare. Now it seems few younger people can even read the face of an analogue clock.