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.

Although of ancient origin, in Europe the idea of laying carpet on the floor is surprisingly recent. Woven and backed textiles resembling modern carpets appear to have originated in the Caucasian area and in Anatolia, and first made their way to western Europe with the Crusades. It was another seven centuries before Europeans realised they weren’t only intended to be hung from walls or placed on tables. Their wider adoption as floor coverings may have been limited by the difficulties in cleaning by beating them outdoors.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Carpet Merchant (of Cairo) from 1887 shows a contemporary trading scene in almost photographic detail. Standing on and among crumpled up carpets in this corner of a souk is a group of traders and their customers, admiring one particularly fine example hanging from a balcony as they haggle over price. As an image within an image, Gérôme paints the calligraphic design of the carpet in painstaking detail.

You could easily mistake Georges Rochegrosse’s undated Palace Entertainment for another by his contemporary Gérôme, although by this time (the period 1894-1914) Rochegrosse was often far more painterly in his style. It shows a dancer with musical group entertaining some Algerian men, her routine involving a pair of short swords. Under her feet is a large and brilliant scarlet carpet.

Carpets were also in widespread use as floor coverings throughout Turkey and the Middle East, as shown in Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting of Reciting the Quran from 1910. At its foot is a wonderful deep blue carpet.

In Philip Hermogenes Calderon’s “Lord, Thy Will Be Done” from 1855, the small and threadbare piece of carpet tells you more about this young mother’s financial and social status than any other object in the room.

Among the early depictions of floor carpets is James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s chinoiserie interior painted in 1863-65, which might give rise to geographical confusion.

Whistler’s The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, is shown above and in the detail below. The model’s features are European rather than Oriental (she was actually from an Italian family), but she’s wearing a fine silk kimono and holding a fan. Behind her is a painted screen from Japan, and under her feet is a lush white and blue carpet.

This is the painting at the focal point of the lavish dining room of the London house of Frederick Richards Leyland, a shipping magnate. Whistler and Leyland fell out over changes the artist made to the original design, and Whistler was forced into bankruptcy as a result. The contents of the room were purchased in 1904, moved to the USA, and exhibited in the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC, from 1923.

In Giovanni Boldini’s Peaceful Days (The Music Lesson) from 1875, a younger boy sits on a vividly decorated carpet studying an epée, with a cello behind him. Judging by their dress and surroundings, these two are at least comfortably off, and certainly well-carpeted.

There’s also something indulgent and sensuous about lying back on an exotic carpet, in the way that this woman is in John William Waterhouse’s Dolce Far Niente or The White Feather Fan (1879). She’s plucking feathers from the fan and watching them rise through the air, a perfect way to while away the time, it seems.

William Merritt Chase’s paintings of his studio acted as a shop window for prospective customers. In his Studio Interior from about 1882, a fashionably dressed young woman is glancing through a huge bound collation of Chase’s work, sat by a grand carved wooden sideboard, decorated with almost outlandish objects including a model ship, a lute, and sundry objets d’art. Under her feet is a wonderful blue carpet, no doubt ready to transport her into the scenes shown in Chase’s book.

By the turn of the century, and Félix Vallotton’s disturbing domestic scenes such as Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures (1904), the prosperous were having wall-to-wall carpets fitted in their houses. The lady of the house is standing on a patterned carpet that runs under the bed, and at the left extends to the wall.

Colours and patterns soon became vibrant if not gaudy.

In Pierre Bonnard’s Nude in Bathtub from about 1938-41, the flooring dazzles, and Marthe’s brown dog has its own mat.

Eric Ravilious’ Farmhouse Bedroom (1939) overwhelms the viewer with the patterns in its flooring that contradict rather than complement its walls.