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.

In this second article about reading dancing in paintings, I move on to its most formalised expression, in ballet, which came to dominate the work of several artists in the late nineteenth century, most notably that of Edgar Degas.

His ballet paintings came to concentrate on smaller groups of dancers, focussing more on their form and movement, as in Swaying Dancer (Dancer in Green) from 1877-79. This is painted not in oils, but a combination of pastel and gouache.

Depicting movement has always been a technical challenge. At the end of the century, Franz von Stuck appears to have used flowlines in his Dancers in 1896, rather than simple motion blur.

A decade after the dancing career of La Carmencita went into decline, John Singer Sargent used his virtuoso brushstrokes to capture her motion. His inspiration was the swish of Giovanni Boldini, in the movement of the fabric rather than its form.

Exotic dancing also featured in Orientalist paintings, with their erotic associations.

Théodore Chassériau painted this sketchy portrait of two Moorish Dancers in 1849, in the style of Delacroix.

Georges Rochegrosse’s undated Palace Entertainment shows a dancer with a musical group entertaining some Algerian men, her routine involving a pair of short swords.

The early Christian church had developed moral concerns over popular performing arts including music and dancing, and by the time of Hieronymus Bosch they were included alongside gambling in those who had gone to Hell.

Edward Poynter’s The Ionian Dance: Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos, Matura virgo et fingitur artubus (1895) quotes the ‘Roman’ Odes of Horace, and describes the ‘corruption’ of a young woman who learns the ‘lascivious’ movements of this particular dance. The Latin text may be translated as it pleases the mature virgin to be taught the movements of the Ionian Dance, and shapes her limbs. However, artubus may be a double entendre, as it can also refer to the sexual organs.

Poynter’s painting shows a shapely young woman, wearing nothing but a diaphanous dress, dancing vigorously in front of an audience of eight other women, who seem critically engaged in her performance. This appears decidedly Aesthetic, as well as more than a little risqué.

Although it may seem a paradoxical subject for the slow and painstaking Divisionist approach to painting, Georges Seurat’s Le Chahut (The Can-Can) (1889-90) is a well-known celebration of a dance that became notorious in its day.

It was an infamous dance from a reinterpretation of the martyrdom of John the Baptist that swept Europe and North America in the early twentieth century, that of Salome.

The paintings Gustave Moreau made of Salome initiated this, among them being this later oil version of The Apparition from 1876-77. Those prompted Gustave Flaubert to write a short story telling this radical rewriting of the martyrdom, from which Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé, and that in turn led Richard Strauss to write his opera. In 1906, the dancer and choreographer Maud Allan produced a show in Vienna featuring the Dance of the Seven Veils that had been included in both Wilde’s play and Strauss’s opera, and many considered to be nothing short of a striptease.

Strauss’s opera arrived in New York in 1907, and inspired Robert Henri to invite a Mademoiselle Voclexca to perform the notorious Dance of the Seven Veils in his studio. He then interpreted her dance into a series of paintings, including this Salome (1909), in which John’s head has been omitted altogether.

We’ve strayed a long way from faeries and country folk.

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.

Women in towns and cities were widely engaged in light factory work, commonly that involving the production of fabrics and garments such as spinning, weaving and assembly. Large numbers were also employed in domestic service industries including laundry and sewing, the subject of this article.

Concentration of people in urban areas transformed what had been a small-scale household function into a sizeable service industry that was eventually industrialised by companies who have concentrated on the hotel trade. Individual washerwomen who might have been servants in households collected, laundered and finished clothing and linen that were then returned to the customer.

On a grey day of showers in 1842, the major French landscape artist Eugène Isabey caught laundresses at work above The Town and Harbour of Dieppe. There’s a second group at the extreme left edge whose washing looks in danger of being blown away over the town below.

The landscape painter Johan Jongkind returned to Paris in 1859, where he painted this view of Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris, with a small group of washerwomen at work by the water’s edge. The bridge shown here connects the city to the south with the Île Saint-Louis, which had originally been two smaller islands close to the Île Notre Dame, on which the cathedral stands. Jongkind isn’t interested in the market for topographic paintings, though, and his attention is on the washerwomen and the old bridge.

In the early years of the Impressionist movement, Berthe Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (1875) shows a communal drying area at the edge of a town, probably one of the suburbs of Paris. The women have a large black cart to transport the washing, and are busy putting it out on the lines to dry in sunny spells. Next to that area is a small allotment where a man is growing vegetables, and in the distance are the chimneys of the city.

Early in his career, Edgar Degas started painting a series of works showing laundresses. 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. She is surrounded by pieces of her work.

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.

Washing, drying and ironing clothes was long and arduous, paying but a pittance. At the end of the day came exhaustion.

Fernand Pelez’s early portrait of a Sleeping Laundress from about 1880 is one of a group of works showing poor women reclining. For all her obvious poverty, there is a faint smile on her face, as she enjoys a brief rest from her long hours of washing.

In Christian Krohg’s view, young women came to the city to work as seamstresses, who later ended up as prostitutes. The young woman seen in his Tired from 1885 is one of many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. At the left is an empty cup, which had probably contained the coffee she drank to try to stay awake at her work. Krohg and others claimed that the paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient and drove women to seek alternatives. Prostitution was tolerated in Oslo (then known as Kristiania) from 1840, with the introduction of police and medical supervision of women sex-workers.

Eva Bonnier’s Dressmakers (1887) features two women dressed in plain working clothes, who are collaborating on the making of a dress for a special occasion.

Judging by the sheer volume of garments in Hans Best’s undated Sewing Women in the Room, these two women are professional seamstresses working at home, sharing the single sewing machine.

It took two world wars in the following century to start changing the division of labour between men and women.

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.

Long before cities gained their bright lights they had plenty of inns and taverns where folk could consume alcoholic drinks until they couldn’t pay for them any more. Persistent drunkenness has been recognised as a problem since ancient times, but it wasn’t until the latter half of the nineteenth century that its consequences on health were reported. Of course, alcohol abuse also took place in the country, but it was in the towns and cities that it became most obvious and destructive.

In French cities like Paris the main culprit was seen as absinthe, produced from species of wormwood plants, and claimed to contain addictive and destructive drugs in addition to its high alcohol content. It was developed in the late eighteenth century, and popularised the following century, particularly among artists and writers.

Edgar Degas’ famous painting In a Café or L’Absinthe from 1873 laments the fate of those who ended up drinking it. Pale green to yellow in colour, it was normally diluted with water, turning it cloudy, as seen is this woman’s glass.

Absinthe wasn’t the only route to alcoholism, though, as shown in Édouard Manet’s Drinker of Bocks from about 1878-79. Bock is a strong and dark lager originally brewed in Germany, and was often viewed as the start of the descent to absinthe and oblivion. Its equivalent in England was barley wine, with its similarly high alcohol content.

In The Absinthe Drinkers (c 1880-81) Jean-François Raffaëlli followed from Degas, here with two down-at-heel men sat outside a bar.

The Drinkers, or Monday’s Work (1884) is one of Émile Friant’s first social realist paintings, showing two unemployed and unskilled men sat drinking together against an exterior wall. The hands of the more distant man are conspicuously grubby and unkempt, and a small dog looks on accusingly.

Jean Béraud’s Letter from 1908 gives a glimpse into the café culture of the years prior to the First World War. The man looks rough, and is unshaven, although the woman is elegantly dressed, and apparently engaged in writing a letter. His battered old brown bowler hat suggests a working past before he succumbed to absinthe.

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 bottles containing alternatives.

As with Edvard Munch and so many other artists, Aksel Waldemar Johannessen was prone to bouts of heavy drinking. In The Drinker’s Family from 1916, perhaps painted during a period of remorse over his behaviour, the artist here includes two self-portraits, as the young man at the right, and the wrecked alcoholic at the left.

The Morning After (1916) is another self-portrait of Johannessen as a drunkard, his arm around a woman who pokes her tongue out in disapproval of his addiction.

The culmination of this descent is shown in Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888, where a pair of charitable bourgeois ladies have arrived at the hovel that is home to a young mother and her small child. Beside the woman, on a small table under the window, are a couple of bottles of her favourite ‘poison’, quite likely absinthe.

Given how common stairs are, they only rarely feature in paintings of interiors, and when they do, they’re usually glimpsed to the side or in the background rather than central to the picture. Stairs are normally constructed of a series of steps, alongside which are one or more rails for the hands to grasp, and to prevent folk from falling over the edge. Supporting that rail are vertical balusters, and together they form a balustrade or banisters.

I’ve recently shown William Frederick Yeames’ painting of the death of Amy Robsart (1877) in suspicious circumstances. On the morning of 8 September 1560, when staying at a country house near Oxford, she dismissed all her servants, and was later found dead, as shown here, with a broken neck at the foot of the stairs. In the gloom above her body is Anthony Forster, one of her husband’s men, leading his manservant down the stairs when they discover Amy’s body. Was he the cause?

A few artists have used stairs for portraits of children.

Briton Rivière’s Sympathy, from about 1878, shows a girl who has been sent to sit at the top of the stairs in disgrace, as her pet dog comforts her. The steps themselves are carpeted, and beside her is a heavy wooden balustrade. At the top of the flight is a closed door, its key dangling on a chain.

Olga Boznańska’s Portrait of Two Children on the Stairs (1898) shows siblings dressed in matching smocks, sat on a bare wooden staircase with a decorative wrought iron balustrade.

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s undated Girl on Stairs has just descended this narrow winding staircase and is about to emerge from the doorway at its foot.

The most compact type of stairway short of a ladder is constructed in a spiral, with early examples dating back to around 400 BCE. These came to flourish in town houses of the Dutch Golden Age.

Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Meditation from 1632 shows their sinuous curves seemingly defying gravity as they rise to the storey above.

Isaac Koedijck shows another early example in his Surgeon Tending a Peasant’s Foot (1649-50), although these seem even more impossible.

Over two centuries later, spiral stairs appeared in one of Edgar Degas’ early paintings of ballet dancers.

Degas’ Dance Class from about 1873 is an elaborately composed example of the works that were to make up half his total output. It shows well his meticulous draughtsmanship, and the strange effect of ballet dress in apparently dismembering the dancers, who become head, arms and legs with a white blur of chiffon between. This is most intense in the tangle of legs making their way down the spiral stairs at the upper left, and in the group of dancers just to the right of those. Like many modern spiral stairs, these are built of wedge-shaped steps known as winders joined in a central column, and probably cast in iron.

Grand buildings deserve grand stairs, as shown in Louis Béroud’s early painting of The Staircase of the Opéra Garnier (1877).

Finally, stairs are a recurrent feature of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s series of prints of an Imaginary Prison.

The Round Tower is the first plate in the first edition, with its fearsome Gothic flights of stairs.