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.

Even for those well versed in the act of writing, it usually demanded a formal technique and took place at a dedicated piece of furniture, a writing desk. That often provided storage for the quills, pens and ink required, as well as a stock of paper. They could also be more elaborate and house a complete office with correspondence sorted into drawers, and pigeonholes that much later were models for software mailboxes. For the wealthy these more elaborate writing desks might be crafted by a joiner using exotic woods into a large bureau.

Antonello da Messina’s groundbreaking oil painting of Saint Jerome in his Study from around 1475 features an integrated office with shelving, although there are few books visible.

Gerard ter Borch’s Woman Writing a Letter from about 1655 shows a more modest desk doubling as a table. Its heavy decorated table cover has been pushed back to make room for the quill, ink-pot, and letter. Behind the woman is her bed, surrounded by heavy drapery, and at the lower right is the brilliant red flash of the seat.

Vermeer painted at least two works showing women writing, of which the earlier is A Lady Writing a Letter from 1665-1666. The fur trimmings on her golden jacket confirm that this is no country bumpkin, but the lady of an affluent and well-educated house. Rather than looking down at her quill, she stares the viewer out, her faint smile of confidence lit by sunlight coming through the window off to the left. This illustrates the importance of placing a writing table or desk where it can be lit well by daylight, hence an association between writing desks and windows.

Matthäus Kern’s watercolour showing A Study Interior at St. Polten (1837) reveals two contrasting types of writing desk: that at the right edge has a drawer and pigeonholes above to order papers and correspondence, while the long desk to the left of it has books, papers and writing instruments laid out across its flat surface, and a folding extension leaf to accommodate even more.

Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s painting of Kit’s Writing Lesson from 1852 shows this young character from Charles Dickens’ novel The Old Curiosity Shop struggling to write with a more modern dip pen. Sewing next to Kit Nubbles is the orphaned heroine Nell Trent, who is teaching him to write in the shop where he works.

Lesser Ury’s Woman at a Writing-Desk from 1898 is an everyday interior with a woman, a pianist perhaps, sitting writing at her bureau-style desk. The popularity of bureaux was perhaps one mark of the achievement of education.

Paul Helleu’s portrait of Madame Paul Helleu Seated at Her Secretaire, Seen from the Back from about 1900 is an unconventional view of his wife, who appears dressed for a social engagement rather than catching up with her letter-writing.

There’s dispute as to whether this painting by Félix Vallotton shows a Woman Reading in an Interior, as given by its French title, or a woman writing. Vallotton painted this in 1904, and its single figure doesn’t show her face as she sits at her small bureau, backlit by the light streaming in through the window.

Pierre Bonnard painted a few interiors featuring a woman writing. The Letter from about 1906 is a conventional portrait of a well-dressed woman sitting at a desk or table to write a letter, and may have used Anita Champagne as the model. Her right hand holds a fountain pen with its own ink reservoir, a big step forward from the quill.

The New Necklace (1910) is one of William McGregor 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 so that she can reach behind and hold out her left hand to receive the new necklace of the title. This is being lowered into her hand by a slightly older woman, in a dark blue-green dress, whose face and eyes are cast down, and her left hand rests against her chin. The writing desk of this bureau is hinged so that it stores vertically and encloses the drawers inside.

A last aside: not one of these writers appears to be holding their quill or pen in their left hand. Teachers of the past weren’t as accommodating.

Most wall coverings such as tapestries, drapes and wallpaper aren’t designed for rooms that see arduous use, or get wet. For those an even older solution has stood the test of time, with baked clay or ceramic tiles. They have been widely used to protect the walls of wet areas like bathrooms, rooms where the walls need to be washed down frequently like kitchens, and in inns and bars. They may also be used instead of a wooden ‘skirting board’ at the base of an interior wall, where damp is a common problem.

The production of tin-glazed earthenware plates and tiles in the Low Countries started in about 1500 in the port of Antwerp, but when that city was sacked in 1576, most potters moved north. From about 1615, those in Delft developed distinctive products with blue decoration on a white base. When there was an interruption to the supply of Chinese porcelain in 1620, this Delftware was ready to take the market. By this time what had been earthenware had been refined to the point where it looked as good as expensive porcelain.

Delftware plates populated many shelves and dressers of the Dutch Golden Age, but most numerous were small tiles, produced by the million. Some houses in the Netherlands still have those Delft blue-on-white tiles dating from the seventeenth century. This article celebrates their appearance in paintings of interiors (mostly).

Inevitably, they feature in at least one of Jan Vermeer’s wonderful interiors.

Vermeer’s Milkmaid from about 1660 shows a kitchen or house maid pouring milk from a jug, beside a tabletop with bread. Behind the bread is a dark blue studded mug with pewter lid, and just in front of the woman (to the right of the mug) a brown earthenware ‘Dutch oven’ pot into which the milk is being poured. 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.

Several artists in the nineteenth century returned to similar interiors from the Dutch Golden Age.

A Soldier and Men in an Inn is one of Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate’s period scenes, showing a room with the walls decorated by blue on white Delft tiles.

Early in the career of the Dutch artist Jozef Israëls, he painted The Seamstress (1850-88) as a scene from the Golden Age. A young Dutchwoman works with her needle and thread in the light of an unseen window at the left. In the background to the right, there’s a group of Delft tiles on the wall, and there’s a single tulip in a glass vase at the left.

The greatest exponent of these views from history is Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema, wife of the renowned Victorian painter Sir Lawrence. Unlike her husband, who had been born in the Netherlands and trained in Antwerp, she came from London, but fell in love with these Dutch interiors.

Her undated painting of The Bible Lesson is one of her earlier examples, and features an older woman teaching her young granddaughter from Biblical scenes depicted on the Delft tiles in her house.

Just as her husband Lawrence researched his classical paintings to achieve accuracy and authenticity, so Laura did the same for her historical paintings, such as A Carol (date not known), showing a group of children singing carols outside the door of what appears to be an apartment.

A Knock at the Door (1897, Opus 90) is her most explicit painting in terms of dates. It’s set in 1684, during the period of peace between the Second Treaty of Westminster (1674) and Treaty of Nijmegen (1678), and the crisis in relations with England that arose in 1688. She has also not only provided an Opus number (90), but a date for her painting of 1897. This attractive young woman checks that she’s looking at her best in a mirror, presumably just before she receives a visitor. Lining the wall at floor level is a fine series of Delft tiles.

Her undated In Good Hands is another period domestic interior, as one of the older daughters keeps watch over a younger brother as he sleeps in a four-poster bed beside his windmill toy. The girl rests her feet on a foot warmer similar to Vermeer’s as she sews to pass the time. To her right is a single Delft tile on the wall close to the floor.

When I first saw Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s undated Battledore and Shuttlecock I was fascinated by its floor. Not so much the animal skin that seems ostentatious even for the rich, but its unique tiles decorated with a pattern based on the artist’s family monograms. This shows the predecessor to modern badminton, then often played indoors by young women wearing full dresses.

Delft tiles were by no means the only ceramics to be fixed to walls, and there’s also a long and fine tradition of Islamic wall tiling.

Georges Jules Victor Clairin’s portrait of An Ouled-Naïl Tribal Dancer from 1895 takes us briefly outdoors to see these beautiful botanical designs.

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.

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’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.

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.

Over the last twenty years a Danish painter of interiors has become one of the best-known Nordic artists, thanks largely to a TV documentary aired in 2005, Michael Palin and the Mystery of Hammershoi. Like others of that time, Vilhelm Hammershøi had attained critical acclaim in life, then was rapidly obliterated in the rush to Modernism in the early twentieth century. Prices for his paintings have soared as he came into vogue over the last twenty years, and now normally exceed a million dollars, with one selling in 2018 for over five million.

As more have come to see his interiors, adjectives applied to them have become excessive or plain wrong. They have been described as recording the “banality of everyday life”, which they surely don’t, as “poetic” and “subdued”, “muted in tone”, and more. I’ll let you be the judge of his remarkable interiors.

Hammershøi was born in Copenhagen, capital of Denmark, in 1864, the son of a prosperous merchant. His younger brother Svend became an accomplished potter, and the two brothers remained close and worked together as business partners. Vilhelm had private art lessons from the age of eight, then studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and with PS Krøyer (one of the prominent and successful Nordic Impressionists who met each summer at Skagen) until 1885, when he made his exhibition debut.

Until the closing years of the nineteenth century he mainly painted muted landscapes and portraits, then concentrated more on interiors. He and his wife Ida lived in an apartment at 30 Strandgade in Copenhagen between 1889-1910, where the majority of these interiors were painted.

His Interior in Louis Seize style. From the Artist’s Home. Rahbeks Allé was painted in 1897, when they were living in a more colourful apartment, although its colours are still muted, and the room empty apart from a few chairs, a small table and what may be a heater.

His Interior with a Bust from about 1900 is thought to show a corner of the dining room, where a bust could perhaps be intentionally misread as a figure playing a keyboard instrument.

Interior with Ida in a White Chair, also from 1900, is one of many showing his wife Ida with her back to the viewer, and a recession of open doors. This room is also barren, and the chair familiar from his interior at Rahbeks Allé above.

Interior with the Artist’s Wife Seen from Behind (1901) is one of at least three similar views he painted that year showing his wife near their piano. Comparison with the others shows that he has simplified this version by omitting details of the wall panels, making it look even more spartan.

Room in the Artist’s Home in Strandgade, Copenhagen, with the Artist’s Wife from 1901 is one of many in which Hammershøi explores the effects of light pouring in through the apartment’s windows. Two distinctive features of some of his other interiors are noticeable here: irregularity in details that would normally be rectilinear, such as the panels on the door, which look all ‘wonky’; soft focus in parts of the image that might appear similar to that famously used by Vermeer.

Three years later, in 1904, Hammershøi painted The Collector of Coins lit by two candles, and apparently against the same window and door. There are subtle differences in detail, such as omission of mouldings on the wall at the left, but the addition of mouldings to the panel below the window. The door still looks wonky and, most unusually for his interiors, the figure faces the viewer even though he is looking down at his coins.

Interior, Sunlight on the Floor from 1906 returns to the same scene, this time without any figures and in higher contrast. The curtains have vanished, but that door looks wonkier than ever.

His undated Interior from the Home of the Artist also appears to have been painted inside the apartment at 30 Strandgade, this time with a recession of doors and fuller details of its wall decoration.

The double doors in his Interior with Ida Playing the Piano from 1910 appear better aligned, as we look at the back of the artist’s wife as she’s seated at the piano in the next room. There’s more furniture here as well, and a deep metal plate on the table.

In some of his paintings his control of focus and edges is prominent, as in this Interior with the Artist’s Easel from 1910. Although the easel’s edges are soft, the sharpest focus here is on the distant bowl whose role isn’t clear.

In about 1910, the owner of the building in which Hammershøi and his wife were living evicted his tenants to undertake renovation. The Hammershøis appear to have moved to 25 Bredgade for a while, then on to 25 Strandgade in 1913.

His later interiors gathered additional objects and details, as seen in this Interior with Potted Plant on Card Table, Bredgade 25 from 1910-11. This appears to be the same view as Interior with the Artist’s Easel above, but with more furniture and the same bowl brought forward from the room behind, which is now just a white void.

Perhaps the best clues to Hammershøi’s intent are given in a quotation from an interview with the artist in 1907: “I’ve always thought there was such beauty about a room like that, even if there were no people in it, perhaps precisely when there were none.” Michael Palin surely gives the best advice in the closing words of his documentary: “I think the key to understanding Hammershøi is that he deliberately didn’t want us to know him. He was an artist. He made paintings. The rest is silence.”

Reference

Wikipedia in Danish

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.

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.

As the number of rooms not primarily used for sleeping accommodation grew, every good home came to have a dining room, usually adjacent to the kitchen. This was more or less filled by a table where the whole family, and sometimes its guests, could sit and eat. A few dining rooms have been captured in paint.

Gustave Courbet’s After Dinner in Ornans from 1849 marks the start of his series of realist paintings of everyday life in his home town in rural France. Four middle-class men have just finished dining together in a dark room with a flagstone floor. As one lights a tobacco pipe, the man at the right plays his violin to entertain them. A large hunting dog is curled asleep under a chair, and the man lighting his pipe is still wearing his hat and a long coat.

Nearly forty years later, Paul Signac pictured the bourgeoisie at table in La salle à manger, variously known as Breakfast or The Dining Room from 1886-87, perhaps his first major Neo-Impressionist painting. The man seen in profile with his cigar is Signac’s grandfather Jules, and the woman drinking coffee may be Signac’s mother, although she appears more anonymously as a type rather than a character. This is a far cry from rural Ornans, with its uniformed maid, a spotless tablecloth, plush curtains and a potted plant in the window.

Under the Lamp, painted by Marie Bracquemond in 1887, shows Alfred Sisley and his wife dining in the Braquemonds’ house at Sèvres.

Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885) is a revealing insight into the lives of poor labourers in Nuenen, who are about to feast on a large dish of potatoes under the light of an oil lamp. This dining room appears more improvised, with a table that’s too low to accommodate their knees, and barely enough space to pour out coffee.

In another world just over a decade later, the Danish painter Laurits Andersen Ring’s wife Sigrid sits reading the ‘leftist’ daily newspaper Politiken At Breakfast in 1898. The furniture is modern, designed rather than thrown together, and colour-coordinated. On top of the dresser are some of the peculiar objects we gather through life.

Further north in Sweden, Carl Larsson’s wife Karin is Getting Ready for a Game (1901) as she prepares a tray of refreshments in her dining room. The grown-ups are about to enjoy an evening of cards together with friends.

Fashions for tablecloths and domestic fabrics changed, and by the time that Maurice Denis painted this Breakfast the same year, their patterns overwhelmed the eye.

William McGregor Paxton, a great admirer of Vermeer who adopted the Dutch master’s optical techniques, seems to have painted The Breakfast in 1911 as a ‘problem picture’. As their maid walks out of the dining room, a young wife stares thoughtfully away from her husband, who is showing no interest in her at all, as he hides behind the pages of a broadsheet newspaper. You could cut the atmosphere here with a knife.

In Édouard Vuillard’s Reading in the Dining Room, Vaucresson, Lucy Hessel has already pushed her chair back from the dining table, left her husband Jos reading the newspaper, and is busying herself in the next room.

Evening by the Lamp from 1921 is one of Bonnard’s lamplit interiors, although perhaps by now this room also has electric light. Sat at this dining table are a woman pouring tea, and a grey-haired man.

Finally, Bonnard’s wife Marthe, who developed a lasting fondness for white high-heeled shoes, is seen in his painting of Marthe in the Dining Room from 1933.