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.

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.