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.

It wasn’t that long ago that it was most unusual to go out without wearing a hat. Although they’ve made something of a comeback in recent decades, in much of the world they’re still far from popular unless it’s unusually cold. In this week’s two articles about the reading of paintings, I show a selection where reading the hats can be useful. However, I avoid two other types of headgear that commonly appear in art, as they’ve been covered elsewhere: helmets and halos.

People have put hats on their head since long before recorded history. Some distinctive forms of hat have unusual histories, and puzzling representations in art. Among the many quirks in the amazing paintings of Hieronymus Bosch are figures in or wearing funnels.

Their origin goes back to the Jewish diaspora of the Middle Ages, when Ashkenazi Jews (in particular) migrated to northern Europe, from about 800 CE. Predominantly Christian powers sought to make visible signs to distinguish Jews, and to a lesser extent Muslims, from local Christians, and for many centuries the migrants were persecuted, confined to Jewish ghettos, and generally kept in isolation as much as possible.

One common discriminatory technique employed in much of northern Europe was to require Jews to wear distinctive hats. This played on religious requirements for Jews to cover their heads, and the fact that most people wore hats when outdoors. The patterns of Jewish hat most often recorded are pointed or conical, and some have highly distinctive ‘bobbles’ at the top.

This detail from the centre panel of Bosch’s Haywain Triptych from about 1510-16 shows some unusual headgear probably derived from the appearance of the Jewish hat.

They’re also to be seen in more recent historically accurate depictions of the Middle Ages, as shown by Carl Gustaf Hellqvist in the right of his wonderful large history painting of Valdemar Atterdag Holding Visby to Ransom, 1361 (1882). There’s a rich range of military helmets, and one obvious conical hat being worn by a Jew, seen in the detail below.

In time, conical hats remained visible signs of discrimination. Charles Hunt’s Visit to the Schoolroom from 1859 shows the range of hats worn by children, and at the far right a dunce stands on a chair wearing the trademark conical hat.

As with all forms of clothing and personal decoration, hats have long been objects of fashion, used by individuals to distinguish and adorn, and feed their personal vanity. One of the best examples of this is in Bartholomäus Strobel’s long panoramic view of the Decapitation of Saint John the Baptist at Herod’s Banquet from about 1630-33.

Gathered in this grand banquet are many ranks of nobility wearing contemporary dress with an astonishing range of headgear, from armoured helmets to feathery confections. At the far right, the executioner stands by John’s headless corpse, a large pool of bright blood on the ground where its head once lay. A young woman (who might be Salome) looks up to heaven, her hands clasped in prayer, while an older woman (presumably Herodias) chats with the executioner.

During the English Civil War of 1642-51, hats assumed an even greater importance, to distinguish the two sides, so-called Cavaliers and Roundheads.

William Frederick Yeames’ And when did you last see your Father? indicates this in the Puritan dress of conical hats and plain clothes. This contrasts with the opulent silks of the mother and children, who are clearly Royalists. The young boy is being questioned, presumably as given in the title, for him to reveal the whereabouts of his Cavalier father, an act that’s bringing anguish to his sisters and mother.

Not to be outdone by their subjects, Kings and their bishops had to have their own hats in the form of crowns and mitres.

Probably the most famous depiction of any major coronation is that of Raphael and his workshop in this fresco of the Coronation of Charlemagne from 1514-15, with its serried ranks of mitres and just the one crown to rule them all. The rows of bishops here wear what is the exact opposite of the monks’ bare tonsured heads.

It didn’t take long for the church and other organisations to express rank and superiority in subtle variations of hat.

Raphael’s magnificent Portrait of a Cardinal from 1510-11 pays particular attention to the surface textures of the fabrics. Three quite distinct fabrics are shown in the cardinal’s choir dress: the soft matte surface of the biretta on his head, the subtly patterned sheen of his mozzatta (cape), and the luxuriant folds of his white rochet (vestment). In that scarlet biretta is great power.

Some well-known characters in paintings are instantly recognisable by their hat, in this case the Florentine poet Dante, shown below with Virgil as they are being ferried in the Inferno.

In 1822, the young Eugène Delacroix painted this Barque of Dante, one of his finest narrative works, showing Dante and Virgil crossing a stormy river Acheron in Charon’s small boat. Dante is inevitably wearing his signature red chaperon. This had evolved before 1200 as a hooded short cape, and developed into variants that remained popular until becoming unfashionable in about 1500. For his part, Virgil wears a laurel wreath honouring an epic poet of his stature.

Some of these ancient hats have been perpetuated in formal dress, such as that worn by academics for ceremonial.

In Jean Béraud’s undated The Thesis of Madeleine Brès or The Doctoral Jury he shows us one of the early woman doctoral students defending her thesis before the academic jury, who are wearing what might now appear to be fancy dress hats. At the time this was a major landmark in the improvements in women’s rights, and the archaic headwear serves to emphasise that change.

Finally, hats aren’t always good signs, but can signify the sinister and worse. Although most of us associate the silk top hat with elegant opulence, in its day it gained some dark associations.

Jean-Louis Forain’s Dancer and Admirer Behind the Scenes from 1903 whispers its disturbing message of the association between the top hat and white tie, and under-age prostitution that was rife at the time among dancers of the Paris ballet. It’s not just the hat, but the context in which it’s worn.