As I approach the end of this series looking at paintings of interiors, I reach the rooms well out of sight, those that weren’t talked about in polite company. They often used to be known as the scullery, and now as utility rooms. These are where the dull maintenance tasks took place, where the washing was done by maids, the vegetables prepared for the kitchen, and so on. Although never popular in paintings, they have also brought us one of the masterpieces in the European canon.

Portraits of women washing linen first became popular in Dutch and Flemish ‘cabinet’ paintings, such as Gabriël Metsu’s Washerwoman (c 1650), along with other scenes of household and similar activities. This painting appears authentic and almost socially realist: the young woman appears to be a servant, dressed in her working clothes, with only her forearms bare, and her head covered. She’s in the dark and dingy lower levels of the house, and hanging up by her tub is a large earthenware vessel used to draw water. She looks tired, her eyes staring blankly at the viewer.

It took Jan Vermeer to transform a maid at work in a scullery into a masterpiece, in his Milkmaid from about 1658-1661.

A maid is pouring milk from a jug, beside a tabletop with bread. In the left foreground the bread and pots rest on a folded Dutch octagonal table, covered with a mid-blue cloth. A wicker basket of bread is nearest the viewer, broken and smaller pieces of different types of bread behind and towards the woman, in the centre. Behind the bread is a dark blue studded mug with pewter lid, and just in front of the woman a brown earthenware ‘Dutch oven’ pot into which she is pouring milk.

At the left edge is a plain leaded window casting daylight onto the scene. One of its panes is broken, leaving a small hole. Hanging high on the wall on the left are a wickerwork bread basket and a shiny brass pail. 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. The floor is dull red, with scattered detritus on it.

Although now much better-known for his still lifes, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Laundress (c 1735) is one of his many fine genre paintings. This shows a more humorous view of life ‘below stairs’ in a contemporary household. A woman has her voluminous sleeves rolled up and her head well-covered as she launders in a large wooden tub. She looks off to the left of the painting, with a wry smile on her lips.

In front of her, a small child in tatty clothing is blowing a large bubble from a straw, perhaps using some of the soapy water from the washing tub. At the right is one of the cats, looking as inscrutable as ever. Through a partly open door, a maid is seen hanging clean washing up on an indoor line.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Laundress (1761) is in the dilapidated servants’ area, probably in a cellar, where this provocative and flirtaceous young maid is washing the household linen.

The archetype of the maid who seems to have spent all her time in the scullery is Cinderella, in the popular European folk tale.

Edward Burne-Jones’ Cinderella from 1863 shows her reverted to her plain clothes after the ball, but still wearing one glass slipper on her left foot. She is seen in a scullery with a dull, patched, and grubby working dress and apron. Behind her is a densely packed display of blue crockery in the upper section of a large dresser.

John Everett Millais’ version is very different. A much younger girl, Cinderella is sat in her working dress, clutching a broomstick with her left hand, and with a peacock feather in her right. She also has a wistful expression, staring into the distance almost in the direction of the viewer. The only other cue to the narrative is a mouse, seen at the bottom left. She wears a small red skull-cap that could be an odd part of her ball outfit, but her feet are bare, and there is no sign of any glass slipper.

Early in his career, Edgar Degas started painting a series of laundresses toiling indoors. Woman Ironing (c 1869) shows one of the army of women engaged or enslaved in this occupation in Paris at the time. She is young yet stands like an automaton, staring emotionlessly at the viewer. Her right hand moves an iron (not one of today’s convenient electrically-heated models) over an expanse of white linen in front of her. Her left arm hangs limply at her side, and her eyes are puffy from lack of sleep. The room is full of her work, which threatens to engulf her.

Degas’ less gloomy painting of a Woman Ironing (c 1876-87) maintains the impression of this being protracted, backbreaking work, only slightly relieved by the colourful garments hanging around the laundress as she starches and presses white shirts.

Prior to the nineteenth century most beer, wines and other popular drinks were served to paying customers by staff in inns or taverns that didn’t have a bar or counter as such. From the middle of the century there was a transition to bars, also known as pubs (from public house) in Britain, and varieties of cafés in France and mainland Europe. This article shows some of the interiors of these successors to the inn or tavern.

These two sorry-looking drinkers in Edgar Degas’ famous painting In a Café or L’Absinthe from 1873 are sat on a long bench fitted to the wall behind them, at tables that appear to be fixed. Behind them is a large mirror.

The waitress in Édouard Manet’s Corner of a Café-Concert from 1878-80 has brought these beers from the bar, so customers can drink while they enjoy the musical and stage entertainment. Behind her is a small orchestra in its pit in front of a stage where an actress is performing.

Manet’s In a Café, from 1880, is thought to have been painted using a combination of oil paint and pastels, and may have been an early study leading to his famous painting below.

His Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) engages in enigmatic and optically impossible mirror-play. This forlorn young woman is serving at the bar in front of her, with a large mirror behind showing a reflection that doesn’t match its original. Arranged on the bar are assorted bottles of beers and spirits, that on the far left bearing the artist’s signature. According to the reflection, the audience at the Folies-Bergère are watching the show under the light of a huge chandelier.

Constantin Meunier’s Café del Buzero, Seville probably from around 1882 shows the interior of one of the city’s bars, with a dancer on its small stage.

During his travels in Belgium in 1884, Lesser Ury painted this view of the inside of a Flemish Tavern, as the barmaid drew beer for what seem to be two barefoot young girls.

Évariste Carpentier’s The Foreigners shows the interior of another inn in Belgium. At the right, sat at a table under the window, a mother and daughter dressed in the black of recent bereavement are the foreigners looking for hospitality. Instead, everyone in the room, and many of those in the crowded bar behind, stares at them as if they have just arrived from Mars. Even the dog has come up to see whether they smell right. The artist painted this in the small town of Kuurne in West-Flanders in 1887.

Jean Béraud’s more academic take on The Absinthe Drinkers from 1908 reworks Degas’ painting, with its two glasses of cloudy absinthe, soda syphon, and jug of water. As a bonus, at the top edge he lines up a parade of coloured glass bottles containing liqueurs and other spirits that became popular and functional decoration in bars.

Béraud’s Letter from 1908 gives another glimpse into the café culture of the years prior to the First World War. Polished metal coat-hooks adorn the walls, and there are more liqueur bottles reflected in the mirror.

Sava Šumanović’s Bar in Paris from 1929 shows a sailor chatting up two well-dressed women at a more modern bar, with a bottle of champagne poised for opening, in an ice bucket at the left. One of the women is sat on a high bar stool.

Malcolm Drummond depicts a traditional English public bar in The Princess of Wales Pub, Trafalgar Square: Mrs. Francis behind the Bar, from about 1931. This pub is still open, and is at 27 Villiers Street, just off Trafalgar Square, and not far from the National Gallery. It’s named after the first wife of George IV, who married in secret, thus never became his queen. A row of three pumps for drawing beer dominate the top of the bar, while underneath it is a small sink with taps where used glasses are washed. Above is an array of spirits, together with the red-coated figure promoting Johnnie Walker whisky. This remains the model for the great majority of modern English pubs.

The origin of the umbrella is lost in the mists of time. They have certainly been around in some form for a couple of millennia, but didn’t start to become popular in Europe until the eighteenth century. They have ecclesiastic relations in what’s known as an umbraculum, a small canopy placed over someone like the Pope to indicate their importance.

Although often indistinguishable, umbrellas can be used either to shelter from rain or to cast shade in strong sunlight, while parasols are intended only for the latter purpose. This article concentrates on those used in rain, and its sequel next week will examine those for the sun.

Being more recent, umbrellas don’t appear to have featured in classical or religious narratives, and are seldom involved in those more contemporary.

In Edmund Blair Leighton’s A Wet Sunday Morning from 1896, a well-dressed man is sheltering a young woman under his umbrella as they walk away from church in the rain. There’s a little more depth to this simple story, with two young women enthusiastically watching the couple from the top of the church steps, although no one seems to care about the old widow left to walk behind the couple, alone and without any shelter.

Edgar Degas’ superb narrative pastel painting Waiting (c 1882) shows two women sat side-by-side on a wooden bench in a corridor or waiting area within the ballet of the Paris Opera. Sat to the right of the dancer is a woman wearing black street clothing, holding an unrolled black umbrella, and with black walking or working shoes. Degas here invites the viewer to speculate in constructing their own narrative.

As umbrellas are notoriously hard to handle in strong wind, they may be used to tell the viewer how windy it is.

Christian Krohg’s The Umbrella from 1902 is an unusual one-off: a view looking down from the window of a building on a lone woman. She’s walking up a rough earth track, strewn with rocks, in windy weather, and her umbrella has been blown out by a fierce gust.

The post-Impressionist Maurice Prendergast uses this jostle of multicoloured Umbrellas in the Rain (1899), seen here in Venice, for their visual effect in forming a brilliant arc across the painting.

The great majority of umbrellas seen in paintings simply tell the viewer that it’s raining.

It might not be immediately obvious whether the umbrellas in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Pay to Pass, from about 1803, are intended to provide shelter from rain or sun. However, the family shown are just about to pay the man at the far left, so they can walk across the muddy street on the comfort of the wooden plank on which they’re standing. This spares them and their clothing a coating of mud from the street, and seems to have been common practice at the time.

Umbrellas grew steadily in popularity in Paris, and the painting below, Paris Street, Rainy Day from 1877, is probably the first masterpiece to show them in such widespread use. Gustave Caillebotte’s study for that finished work below has survived and is shown above.

As the rain continues to fall, all the larger figures in the painting are shown holding umbrellas, most of which are regulation black.

Realist artists like Jean Béraud painted street scenes in the French capital, in his case forming a Paris chronicle. Out in the provinces, painters like Nicolas Sicard were doing the same. Sicard’s Entrance to the Guillotière Bridge in Lyon (1879) captures the scene at rush hour on a wet day, as many are rushing around under the canopies of their umbrellas. Note how even the cab drivers are sheltering under umbrellas: those operating open cabs normally provided them for their passengers too.

Just before the Norwegian Naturalist Christian Krohg went to Grez-sur-Loing in France, he seems to have visited Normandy, where he painted this view of a Village Street in Normandy (1882). Its curved recession of umbrellas with disembodied legs is striking.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s brilliant protégé, the tragically short-lived Marie Bashkirtseff, featured an umbrella in this, one of her best portraits, The Umbrella (1883). This girl’s tenacious stare at the viewer quickly becomes quite unnerving, an effect enhanced by the severe black background of the umbrella that she carries.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Umbrellas from about 1881-86 is packed not only with people, but also their umbrellas. In parts they are so crushed together that the taller pedestrians are raising them high, to avoid bumping into others. Together they form a dark blue-grey band between the people below and the grey sky above.

My final painting of umbrellas used to shelter from rain is one of Nikolai Astrup’s early works, Farmstead in Jølster (1902). Two women, sheltering from the rain under their black umbrellas, are walking up a muddy path threading its way through the wooden farm buildings, guiding a young girl.