Interiors by Design: Screens

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.

Kanō Hideyori, Maple Viewers (紙本著色観楓図) (Muromachi, early 1500s), colour on paper, six-section folding screen (byōbu), 150.2 cm x 365.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

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.

William Hogarth (1697–1764), Marriage A-la-Mode: 4, The Toilette (c 1743), oil on canvas, 70.5 × 90.8 cm, The National Gallery, London. Courtesy of The National Gallery London, inventory NG116.

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.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), oil on canvas, 201.5 x 116.1 cm, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

Behind Whistler’s Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, is a painted screen from Japan.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen (1864), oil on panel, 50.1 x 68.5 cm, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

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 (1843–1894), The Duet (1870), media not known, 30.2 × 32.8 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

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.

William Quiller Orchardson (1832–1910), Dolce Far Niente (1872), oil on canvas, 76.2 x 99.7 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Elihu Vedder (1836–1923), Japanese Still Life (1879), oil on canvas, 54.5 x 88.4 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929), Bouderie (Sulking, Gustave Courtois in his Studio) (1880), oil on canvas, 48.3 × 63.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

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 (1867-1947), Man and Woman (c 1900), oil on canvas, 115 x 72.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The Athenaeum.

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 (1869–1941), Tea Leaves (1909), oil on canvas, 91.6 x 71.9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

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.

William McGregor Paxton (1869–1941), The New Necklace (1910), oil on canvas, 91.8 x 73.0 cm, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Zoe Oliver Sherman Collection), Boston, MA. Image courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

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 (1867-1947), Stork and Four Frogs (c 1889), distemper on red-dyed cotton fabric in a three paneled screen, 159.5 x 163.5 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

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.