The overwhelming majority of paintings of interiors show rooms we might aspire to. In this last of the series, I show some we’d all hope to avoid, those of the poor and destitute. Although never really popular as motifs, there have always been a few artists prepared to tackle the ills and inequalities in society, and this became increasingly frequent in the 1880s.

In common with other paintings of inns in the Dutch Golden Age, David Teniers the Younger’s The Dice Shooters (1630-50) is set in a dingy room in a rough tavern. Drawing on their clay pipes and with glasses of beer in hand, a group of men appear completely absorbed in gambling their large stacks of coins on the throw of their dice.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is one of the earliest artists to have paid particular attention to the poor. The Young Beggar, painted in about 1645, shows a young boy squatting in a tiny bare nook in a building. By his filthy feet is a bag full of rotting fruit, and some sort of worms, which apparently form his diet.

François-Auguste Biard’s undated sketchy view In a Mountain Hut may have been made in front of the motif, onto paper. This is unusually social realist for this artist, showing the abject poverty and spartan conditions of many who lived in the more remote areas of France at that time.

It was the Naturalist paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage in the early 1880s that brought depictions of the poor to success in the Salon.

Typical of his portraits is The Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers), one of his last paintings, completed in 1883. This young chimneysweep sitting in his tiny hovel with a stray cat and kitten has the air of authenticity. The hand grasping that slab of bread is still black with soot. Bastien painted this in his home village in northern France.

Antonino Gandolfo’s Compensation (1880-85) depicts prostitution in the city of Catania on the east coast of the island of Sicily, Italy. The man settling his bill is only seen by his hand holding out money, and a foot. The young woman holding out her hand to receive looks away in shame, and wears scarlet to advertise her trade.

We remain in the poor quarter of Catania for Gandolfo’s The Last Coin (c 1880-85). A young woman, who has been spinning, sits on an old chest and takes the last money from her purse, presumably to pay for some milk to fill her blue and white jug. Her family stand with their heads bowed in the gloom behind.

Vincent van Gogh’s early paintings of Nuenen, such as The Potato Eaters from April 1885, depict poor peasant families, here eating inside their dingy cottage lit by a single oil lamp.

Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888 shows a pair of charitable bourgeois ladies arriving 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.

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.

Compared to the number who have painted themselves in their studio, painting galleries have been an unusual theme for interiors. My examples start with a couple of fanciful images, but soon transfer to some of the more famous, as they went public during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Giovanni Paolo Panini’s paintings of Ancient Rome (1757, above) and Gallery of Views of Modern Rome (1759, below) are almost certainly wholly imaginary, although some of their figures look to have been identifiable as leading collectors of the time. These may have been an ingenious device for the artist to show a dazzling array of his own views, of course.

A more accurate reflection of the excesses attained by some is in Johann Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772-77). This shows a section of one room in the palace that had belonged to the Medici family in Florence. It had only recently (1765) been opened to the public when Zoffany painted this for Queen Charlotte, who never visited Italy let alone the Uffizi, although she was the wife of King George III. Several of the paintings included are familiar, including some by Raphael, and it might repay careful study to determine whether the collection is accurate.

As the middle classes were gaining better access to pictures in the nineteenth century, the hoarding of paintings by the upper classes was becoming extreme. Robert Huskisson’s painting of Lord Northwick’s Picture Gallery at Thirlestaine House (1846-47) not only shows one quite modest collection of the time, but reinforces how few people were able to enjoy the paintings secreted in the mansions of the rich.

John Rushout, the second Baron of Northwick (1770-1859), moved his collection from Northwick Park to Thirlestaine House when it grew too large for his own residence. When he died in 1859, he had no children, and this collection was sold off and dispersed around the world.

William Powell Frith’s last great human panorama shows A Private View at the Royal Academy, completed in 1883. Although he was a Fellow from 1853 until his retirement in 1890, his can’t have been an easy relationship with the British art establishment. This work gives some insight into the frictions within the Academy, as Oscar Wilde is seen at the right holding forth about art, to the dismay of Frith’s friends nearby. Frith had opposed the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements, and, like Frederic, Lord Leighton (also shown in this painting), was a great traditionalist.

For Henri Gervex, depicting A Session of the Painting Jury of the Paris Salon was subtle revenge for their refusal of his most famous work Rolla in 1878. The painting the jury are voting on here is a ‘classical’ nude, thus acceptable, compared with Gervex’s of a naked prostitute, thus deemed immoral.

At the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, Louis Béroud emerged as the uncontested specialist in painting the interiors of galleries, specifically the Louvre in Paris. From then until the First World War, he seems to have painted little else.

At the Louvre (1899) is the earliest work of his that I can find showing the interior of the Louvre, although the pretty young lady posing beneath a painting of the deposition of Christ is merely sitting, holding her umbrella, and looking decorative. Nearer the nonchalant, even disinterested, guard is Correggio’s Venus and Cupid with a Satyr (also known as Jupiter and Antiope) from 1528, one of the gallery’s great treasures, and something of a favourite of Béroud.

If you have visited the Louvre, you will be familiar with the many copyists who work there. Some are students who are improving their skills by copying the Masters, but many are painters who sell those copies on. Béroud shows a copyist chatting to a man in The Rubens Room in the Louvre (1904).

He then seems to have become obsessed with painting copyists, and in An Artist in the Louvre with Correggio’s Jupiter and Antiope (1908) returns to the Correggio. Note the use of a sheet of scrap paper under the copyist’s easel, to ensure that no drips of paint ended up on the floor. All but one of Béroud’s copyists seem to be women, although today you’re almost as likely to come across a man. I suspect that reflects the more limited opportunities for women to train as painters at that time.

He started catching his models during their more social moments, as with the discussion taking place in his Copyists in the Louvre (1909). The large painting shown here is Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (1717); to the left is Greuze’s The Milkmaid (1780), and to the right his Broken Pitcher (1785).

The Joys of the Flood (in the Medici Gallery) (1910) is probably the best of all Béroud’s gallery interiors. This time the copyist is the artist himself, the only man to appear in that role in these works. Rubens’ huge The Disembarkation of Marie de’ Medici at Marseilles (1621-25) bursts into life, as its water starts to flood the Louvre and its three nudes step out onto the floor.

Béroud had a close call with the police on 21 August 1911, when he had been painting a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and the original went missing. This was first noticed by Béroud, who reported the theft, and so became embroiled in the crime.

After his moment of fame, Béroud returned to painting his copyists. In his Painter Copying a Murillo in the Louvre from 1913, the only easel occupied is in front of Murillo’s The Young Beggar (c 1645).

Douglas Fox Pitt’s The Stafford Gallery from 1912 is an unusual watercolour with its elevated view recalling Spencer Gore’s Gauguins and Connoisseurs painted the previous year. While Gore’s painting (no image of which is in the public domain) shows a landmark exhibition of Post-Impressionist paintings in the same gallery, Fox Pitt shows an early exhibition of the Scottish Colourist J D Fergusson held from 9 March 1912. The painting shown most prominently is Fergusson’s La Dame aux Oranges (c 1908–09), whose location is now unknown. To the left is The Red Shawl (1908), and on the right is Le Manteau Chinois (1909).

Finally, this painting by Sir John Lavery (1856–1941) of The Opening of the Modern Foreign and Sargent Galleries at the Tate Gallery, 26 June 1926 (1929) was commissioned by the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen to mark the opening of these new galleries by King George V. The King and Queen are seen on the dais, beneath a few of the Tate’s collection of paintings by JMW Turner. Duveen’s name is recorded in the inscription above the doorway.

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.

Some of the performing arts across Europe had their roots not with the affluent upper classes, but as entertainment for the masses. These included the Commedia dell’Arte, and the British music hall that was popular in London and other towns and cities between 1850-1918. These were low-brow theatres that staged variety acts including popular songs, comedy, and anything that might appeal to ordinary working men and women. They originated after about 1830, from entertainment provided in pubs and inns, and like them, music halls also served food and drink.

Although Walter Sickert’s painting of Tipperary dates from 1914, it’s a good example of the origin of the music hall. It shows the artist’s model ‘Chicken’ sat at a pub piano playing the contemporary hit, It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. That had swept to popularity with British troops in 1914 as they went off to fight in the trenches on the other side of the Channel.

Before Sickert had taken up painting in 1881, he had tried pursuing a career as an actor, resulting in his lasting interest in performing arts and the music hall in particular. His early painting of Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties. Second Turn of Katie Lawrence from about 1888 shows the dimly lit interior of a music hall, as a young woman sings to an audience that appears unreceptive. Hungerford is a market town around sixty miles to the west of London, and appears to be an unlikely location for this music hall, which is more probably in the west of London.

Another young woman sings from the gloom in Sickert’s The Music Hall, or more cryptically The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror, from 1888–89.

Among more than five hundred music halls around Britain at the time, Sickert made the Bedford in Camden Town, London, his favourite. The first there, known as the Old Bedford, opened in 1861 and was destroyed by fire in 1898. Its successor was the New Bedford, which was larger and even featured electric lighting. Among others who frequented the New Bedford was the novelist Virginia Woolf, and its performers included Charlie Chaplin before it finally closed in 1959.

His view of The Pit at the Old Bedford from 1889 shows the limited accommodation for musicians between the audience and stage.

Sickert sketched Vesta Victoria at the Old Bedford in about 1890.

His enthusiasm for music halls inspired others in the Camden Town Group to paint them as well, most notably Spencer Gore.

Gore soon developed a fascination for the theatre and music hall, and in 1906 started regular visits to the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square, well-known at the time for spectacular ballets and acrobats. Like Degas and others in Paris, he sketched performances, then turned those into studio paintings. This sketch of The Alhambra Theatre, “On the Sands” was made in 1910, using black chalk and graphite, and appears more compositional in purpose. The artist has squared it up ready to transfer to canvas.

Ballet Scene from “On the Sands” (1910) is Gore’s finished painting. He has amended the foreground structure at the lower left, representing the front of the box or gallery he was seated in, but most of the other details appear faithful to his sketch. He has divided much of his canvas between the ballet on the stage at the upper left, and the musicians in the orchestra pit in the lower right.

Gore’s painting of the musical double act of Inez and Taki (1910) is another of his views from inside the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties. They’re playing antiquated lyre guitars, an odd choice of instrument.

Later in his career, Sickert returned to his enduring theme of music halls in The New Bedford, painted in about 1914-15, capturing the splendour of the interior at its height.

After the First World War, music halls were replaced as public tastes changed, and licensing laws prevented them from serving alcohol. The great majority were closed by the 1960s, when television was taking over as the most popular means of entertainment.

Paintings of the interiors of cowsheds and barns haven’t been prominent, but provide a more continuous record than any other type of interior because of their role in genre paintings of every age after the Renaissance. Here are a few.

Gerard ter Borch put the milkmaid and her cow at the centre of this painting, A Maid Milking a Cow in a Barn from about 1652-54. As was universal at that time, milk was collected in a wooden bucket that would have been scrubbed thoroughly before use, but fell far short of modern standards of hygiene. At the upper right is a store of hay to supplement the cows’ diet during the winter.

David Teniers the Younger’s Barn Interior from about the same period shows a milkmaid pouring freshly collected milk into a large earthenware flask, through a muslin filter. This is taking place under the watchful eye of an older woman, probably the head of the domestic staff. Resting against a barrel is a well-worn besom that has seen good work keeping the floor clean.

In Franz Niklaus König’s Farmers, around the House;, or Farmer Family in the Barn from 1798, one of the early hand-cranked threshing machines is shown on the right, as the farmer is winnowing clouds of chaff from the grain it produced. Most barns were built with large openings at each end, to allow natural breezes to blow the chaff away and leave the denser grain in the large, shallow wickerwork trays used for winnowing. The farmer’s wife, two children and dog are keeping him company as he works.

The Shearers (c 1833-35) is the most ambitious of Samuel Palmer’s paintings from the 1830s. This shows the seasonal work of a shearing gang, in a sophisticated composition that draws the gaze to the brilliant and more distant view beyond. The curious collection of tools to the right was the subject of preparatory sketches, and seems to have been carefully composed. However, they have defied any symbolic interpretation, and may just ‘look right’ for a barn at the time.

Albin Egger-Lienz’s Farm in Grafendorf, from 1890, shows deeply rustic conditions on a dilapidated farm in Styria, Austria, as a young woman sits churning butter on a stone platform in a tumbledown barn. This isn’t the right environment for the preparation of food for human consumption.

Nikolai Astrup’s humorous painting of Early Courting from 1904 shows a young couple at the far left engaged in ‘clothed courting’ in the unromantic surroundings of a cowshed in a Norwegian valley. This couple have sought the privacy of the cowshed, out of everyone’s way, but the boyfriend appears unaware that they’re being watched by someone up in the roof. From the apparent direction of gaze of the girlfriend and the blush on her cheeks, she has just noticed the peeping tom or watchful relative. The setting is enhanced by the sunlight pouring through the far window, illuminating two rows of the back-ends of cows. The wood floor between the cows appears to be decorated with small sketches, but those are actually piles of cow dung. And that’s where I’d like to leave it.

Until well into the twentieth century, many of the people across Europe and North America spent time in church. For most communities, a local church was its centre, where everyone underwent their rites of passage from christening to funeral. Church registers recorded those events, and are now a rich source of information for genealogists and historians. Relatively few painters seem to have recorded the interiors of churches, though. Here are some examples.

Royal weddings were full of pageantry, as shown in William Frith’s painting of the Marriage of the Prince of Wales, 10 March 1863, completed in 1865. This took place under the watchful eye of the groom’s mother, Queen Victoria (on the balcony at the upper right), who seems to be attracting as much attention as the wedding in progress below her. The groom was to become King Edward VII on the death of the Queen; his bride was Alexandra of Denmark, who was only eighteen at the time. The ceremony took place in Saint George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, which must be one of the grandest chapels in Britain.

Marià Fortuny painted this intricately detailed view of a contrasting Spanish Wedding in 1870. The scene is the interior of a sacristy, where a wedding party is going through the administrative procedures of the marriage ceremony. The groom is bent over a table, signing a document, while the bride behind him (holding a fan) is talking to her mother. The rest of the wedding party waits patiently, but a woman at the back of the small group turns towards a penitent, who stands to the right of the group. He carries an effigy of the soul burning in flames, hardly appropriate for the occasion.

Elizabeth Nourse was born into a Catholic family, and appears to have remained a devout believer all her life. In 1890 she seems to have visited central Italy, where she painted the superb frescoes in the Papal Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, in The Church of Saint Francis of Assisi.

Paul César Helleu’s Interior of the Basilica of Saint-Denis (c 1891) is an example of his interest in churches and their stained glass, which included Reims Cathedral. The Basilica of Saint-Denis was the burial place for almost every French king between the tenth and eighteenth centuries, and now lies within the north of the city of Paris, although Saint-Denis was formerly its own city. The window shown is that of the north transept, featuring the tree of Jesse; a south transept rose shows the Creation.

It was the Norwegian painter Harriet Backer who took greatest interest in church interiors.

Backer’s Churching (1892) shows a traditional ceremony in which a woman who has just completed the confinement following the birth of her child is received back at church, where she gives thanks for the survival of her baby and herself, and prays for their continuing health. This is believed to show the sacristy to the left of the altar in Tanum Kirke, in Bærum, Norway.

The next event in the life of mother and baby is shown in Backer’s Christening in Tanum Church (1892), one of her most sophisticated and greatest paintings which must be among the finest paintings in Post-Impressionism.

This looks both outward and inward. The left of the canvas takes the eye deep, through the heavy wooden church door to the outside world, where a mother is bringing her child in for infant baptism. The rich green light of that outside world colours that door and inner wood panelling, and the floorboards and perspective projection bring the baptismal party in. At the right, two women are sat in an enclosed stall waiting for the arrival of the baptismal party. One has turned and partly opened the door to their stall in her effort to look out and see the party enter church.

Of the many later paintings she made of church interiors, the finest must be Uvdal Stave Church (1909). Stave churches were once numerous throughout Europe, but are now only common in rural Norway. Their construction is based on high internal posts (staves) giving them a characteristic tall, peaked appearance. Uvdal is a particularly good example, dating from around 1168. As with many old churches, its interior has been extensively painted and decorated, and this has been allowed to remain, unlike many painted churches in Britain which suffered removal of all such decoration.

Backer’s richly-coloured view of the interior of the church is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.

Known now for his pioneering paintings of New York skyscrapers, Colin Campbell Cooper also visited Britain and painted The Interior of Lincoln Cathedral in about 1905. This shows the area of the organ in this English cathedral dating from 1088. The organ shown had only recently been installed by the classical organ-builder Henry Willis. Cooper captures particularly well the lofty and distinctive vaulted ceiling and incoming shafts of light.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte had painted a few religious works earlier in his career, but his late pastel of The Prayer, the Church of Saint-Bonnet (before 1920) is probably the most moving. Odilon Redon and other contemporary pastellists also depicted stained glass windows to great effect.

At the start of the First World War, the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims, where the Kings of France were once crowned, had been commissioned as a hospital and demilitarised. German shells hit the cathedral during opening engagements on 20 September 1914, setting alight scaffolding, and destroying some of the stonework. The fire spread through woodwork, melting the lead on the roof, and destroying the bishop’s palace. The French accused the Germans of the deliberate destruction of part of its national and cultural heritage.

Georges Rochegrosse’s Interior of the Cathedral of Reims in Flames (1915) casts this in a curious combination of the physical reality of the shattered masonry and fire, the ancient glory of the cathedral’s stained glass, and an Arthurian figure (possibly the Madonna herself) reaching up to seek divine intervention.