It’s not that long ago that a great many homes in the UK and Europe were heated by open fires. During the 1960s, the house where I lived in the suburbs of London had a single main fireplace burning ‘smokeless’ processed coal throughout the winter months. Even after colour television came in the early 1970s, the National Coal Board was advertising the virtues of open fires in the home. Today’s paintings of interiors show fireplaces and the objects we surrounded them with.

Jules Breton’s Grandfather’s Birthday (1864) shows three generations of a Courrières family living in modest comfort, although their floors are made of bare and worn tiles, furniture is sparse, and the fire is hardly alight. One of the grandchildren is just about to present their grandpa with a simple birthday cake, no icing, as another of the women prepares a celebratory meal in the kitchen. Maybe some firewood might have been a better present. This fireplace has an unusually high mantelpiece, providing just enough room to fit in some cherished plates below the ceiling.

Judging by the thin summer dress worn by the young woman reading in Francis Davis Millet’s Cosey Corner from 1884, the fire burning in this open hearth is primarily to boil water in the large black kettle for her cup of tea. This is a more modern fireplace fabricated in wrought iron. It has a grate to let spent ashes drop into the ash tray underneath, making it simpler to remove them before building the first fire of the day. On either side of the fire are fire dogs, and a kettle is suspended above the glowing embers.

Virginie Demont-Breton’s original painting of The Man is at Sea, above, was completed in or before 1889. This shows a fisherman’s wife warming herself and her sleeping infant by the fire, while her husband is away fishing at sea. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1889, following which it was rapidly engraved for prints. Later that year, Vincent van Gogh saw an image of that painting when he was undergoing treatment in the Saint Paul asylum at Saint-Rémy, and made a copy of it, shown below.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s contrasting The Artist’s Wife and Children, from 1904, shows his wife Sigrid with their young son and daughter, in front of the roaring fire typical of the more affluent middle class home in the early twentieth century. The fireplace is here built into a substantial structure.

Carl Larsson’s Christmas Eve from 1904 shows his large extended family gathering to celebrate in grand style, with a huge turkey, a roaring fire in the large open fireplace, and a cat under the table, trying to get into the party.

William McGregor Paxton’s open fire In the Studio (1905) is appropriately classy and glows confidently in the background. He deliberately defocussed it in what he termed Vermeer’s “binocular vision”. His model is in crisp focus, and as the eye wonders further away from her as the optical centre of the painting, edges and details become progressively more blurred.

Among Douglas Fox Pitt’s views of domestic interiors, Interior with Maid from about 1913 is notable for its display of two of the artist’s collection of paintings by the Camden Town Group. Above the fireplace is Harold Gilman’s Norwegian Street Scene (Kirkegaten, Flekkerfjord) (1913), and above the bright cushion is Charles Ginner’s The Wet Street, Dieppe (1911). The fire is being tended by a maid, and is thoroughly suburban, with tools including a poker at the left. Its mantelpiece is relatively low, and home to a precisely arranged row of ornaments.

Henry Tonks’ Sodales – Mr Steer and Mr Sickert (1930) shows two British painters in their old age: Philip Wilson Steer is dozing in front of the fire while Walter Sickert was visiting him at home in Cheyne Walk, London. This mantelpiece is cluttered with various small objects.

You can’t get through life without seeing a hospital ward interior, and for most of us it’s now where we both start and end our lives. Over the centuries, hospital wards have changed from being mere dormitories to facilities for nursing and medical care of the sick. This article shows in paintings how and when those changes occurred.

Although medicine was still in its infancy at the end of the sixteenth century, it was then that hospital wards first became recognisable in modern terms.

Adam Elsheimer’s Saint Elizabeth of Hungary Bringing Food for the Inmates of a Hospital from about 1598 shows a ward run by a religious order or similar foundation. Above each bed is a religious painting, and watching over them all is a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ. Saint Elizabeth works with her halo visible, feeding the man in the bed nearest the viewer.

With the Age of Enlightenment came the first major voluntary hospitals, funded by benefactors, charities, and public subscription. Johannes Beerblock’s painting shows the modern Wards of the Hospital of Saint John in the city of Bruges in 1778. Each bed was, in effect, its own private cubicle. There were trained medical staff, but nurses were still compassionate carers rather than professionals.

In the centre, middle distance, a group of four elegantly dressed physicians are doing the rounds of their patients. The main caring staff appear to be from a religious order, and wear its elaborate black-and-white uniforms. They are serving food, reading to comfort the sick and dying, and at the left are assisting a priest, perhaps in administering the last rites. Lay staff are cleaning and servicing the needs of patients.

One of the most important revolutions in healthcare was associated with the work of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War. Although she is now a controversial figure, William Simpson’s illustration of One of the Wards in the Hospital at Scutari (Turkey) from 1856 gives an idea of the change that started in the middle of the nineteenth century. Towards the left is a large cabinet containing glass vessels of medication, and there’s a central stove to provide a little heat through the winter.

The hospital building shown in Luis Jiménez Aranda’s painting of Doctors’ Rounds in the Hospital Ward from 1889 isn’t modern by contemporary standards. A large and august team of physicians, no doubt with their trainees, is examining a patient’s chest during a ward round. The senior physician is bent down with his left ear applied to the back of the patient’s chest. Today, that act of auscultation would be performed using a stethoscope, almost a badge of office for medical practitioners around the world. The stethoscope was still relatively novel in 1889: simple monaural tubes were first used by Laënnec in 1816, but the modern binaural design didn’t evolve until the late 1800s, and an older physician may still have preferred to apply their ear directly to the patient, as shown.

Perhaps the first painting of what we’d recognise as a modern hospital, Jean Geoffroy’s Visiting Day at the Hospital from that same year, is all about light, cleanliness, and the clinical. Like other Naturalist paintings of the time, it also fitted in neatly with the Third Republic’s image of modernising, by applying the latest developments of science to the improvement of life, and illness.

Van Gogh’s Dormitory in the Hospital in Arles (1889) shows how, despite their improvement, mental hospitals were still a long way behind general hospitals of the day. In the foreground is a stove similar to that of Florence Nightingale’s ward in Scutari, and the carers are members of a religious order rather than specialist mental health nurses.

Anna Sahlstén’s Surgery in Hospital from about 1893 shows the dazzling whiteness of the modern hospital, with a smart professional nurse caring for a child patient in the background. On the wall is a large radiator for the hospital’s modern heating system, replacing the traditional stove at last. That’s perhaps just as well, given the winters in Finland, where this was painted.

In one of his loosest and most sketchy works, Nikolay Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky dazzles with white and light in At the Hospital from about 1910. The nurse is taking a patient’s pulse. This ward’s windows are open wide to the countryside beyond, and there’s a large vase of flowers at the right, presumably for the healing effects of nature.

Indian Army Wounded in Hospital in the Dome, Brighton from 1919 is one of Douglas Fox Pitt’s few oil paintings, and shows the Brighton Pavilion in its role as a military hospital with two operating theatres and more than seven hundred beds, making it a unique ward interior. It was unusual for its time in supportingr a wide range of religious, ethnic and dietary needs. However, this painting was made three years after that hospital had closed, following which it had been reopened for the many amputees from the war, providing them with rehabilitation and training. That too closed in the summer of 1920.