Instagram and other social media platforms are filled with interior design profiles which allow us to see the shifts in how we decorate our homes. Trends currently talk of the end of 'greige' minimalism and a return to colourful, eclectic, maximalist interiors. Yet this flourishing of a more artistic approach to home decoration, and more specifically how it is shared through images, is nothing new – in the Victorian period, artists sought to capture similar changes in taste as they happened, through watercolours and drawings.

Design for Summer Smoking Room, Cardiff Castle

Such images were not always for private circulation. Anna Alma-Tadema (daughter of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema) exhibited her highly detailed watercolour paintings of the interiors of artists' London homes both in the UK and in the US. The Drawing Room, Townshend House, 10th September 1880 was shown at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The house in question was the Alma-Tadema family residence near Regent's Park, with its lavishly decorated rooms with clear Middle Eastern influences.

Alma-Tadema documented her friends' aesthetic tastes in Drawing Room, 1a Holland Park, of 1887 (below), a 'portrait' of the house of the wealthy Coronio family. It captures the Coronios' effortlessly tasteful arrangement of furniture, textiles and ceramics, and is so carefully painted in watercolour that the specific materials of these objects can be identified: mother-of-pearl, lacquerware, brass, porcelain.

Conspicuously placed on the wall is a large chalk drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, representing Jane Morris as Tennyson's 'Mariana'.

It was owned by Aglaia Coronio (née Ionides), a talented embroiderer, and is now in The Metropolitan Museum in New York. A finished painted version is in Aberdeen Art Gallery.

Another memorable image from this period is Henry Treffry Dunn's jewel-toned watercolour of the drawing room of Rossetti's house, 16 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. It was painted in the summer of 1882, mere months before Rossetti's death.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Theodore Watts-Dunton

A label on the back of this picture describes it as the 'parlour,' another as the 'Green Dining Room.' Whatever the room's purpose, Dunn was dazzled by it: 'pictures, chiefly old and of an interesting character,' he wrote – 'Chinese black-lacquered panels' above the fireplace, with 'old blue Dutch tiles' beneath them, 'an old English china cupboard', 'a dear little cosy sofa with landscapes and figures painted on the panels of the Cipriani period.'

In other words, it was an eclectic mix of furniture and ornaments from a variety of periods and places, all artfully mixed. Some of the pictures on the parlour wall are Rossetti's own: on the left is his double portrait in chalks of his sister Christina and mother Frances.

Christina Rossetti and Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti, née Polidori

Dunn made other records of Rossetti's distinctive interiors, namely a striking watercolour of the artist's bedroom in the same house in 1872. Unlike the more conventional view shown above, Dunn took inspiration from the plethora of convex mirrors hanging throughout Rossetti's home, painting the bedroom as if it were being reflected in the surface of one such mirror. The watercolour was then placed in a circular frame to complete the effect.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Bedroom at Tudor House, 16 Cheyne Walk

It's a remarkable piece of illusionism, which reflects (pun intended) both the mania for convex mirrors at that time – inspired by Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait – and the trend for arranging blue-and-white ceramics alongside polished metalwork, as seen above the fireplace.

Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and his Wife

Dunn's watercolour may also have been intended to express his personal dislike of the bedroom – 'a most unhealthy place to sleep,' in his words, because of its clutter of bric-a-brac and the thick curtains enclosing the 'antiquated' bed.

Leaving cosmopolitan London, the same artistic sensibilities found expression in countryside properties, such as Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, the summer home of William and Jane Morris from 1871. The house, which can still be visited today, was gradually filled with an eclectic array of objets d'art that were either created by the Morris family and their Pre-Raphaelite friends or brought into the house from elsewhere.

Mary Annie Sloane, a friend of William and Jane's daughter May Morris, painted views of the house in 1912. This watercolour of William Morris's former bedroom depicts the elaborate bed hangings that were designed by May and embroidered by her and her assistants between 1891 and 1893.

William Morris's Bedroom at Kelmscott Manor

Over the fireplace are the framed woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer which May's father had avidly collected. To the right of the bed is an antique chest of drawers, on top of which is a brass candlestick which was designed by Philip Webb for the Morrises' first home, Red House, in 1861. Within this single image, we see a range of artistic styles and periods coexisting within the same space.

Kelmscott inspired the naming of Kelmscott House, the Hammersmith home of the Morrises. This house's equally tasteful interiors were recorded in watercolours by May Morris herself.

End of the Drawing Room at Kelmscott House

This image shows the artists' penchant for arranging textile wall hangings together with ceramics of diverse origins.

Such was the mania for aesthetic interiors that art soon imitated life. In 1863, Edward Burne-Jones painted a watercolour of a weary Cinderella.

Without the literary title, we might mistake this for a portrait of one of Burne-Jones's contemporaries: surrounded by reams of blue-and-white ceramics and other trinkets, this Cinderella is every bit a Victorian aesthete. She even brings to mind Oscar Wilde's famous lament that he found it 'harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china' – a sentiment which may be echoed by the present-day revival of colour and ornamentation.

Robert Wilkes, art historian

This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation