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Before photography became the dominant medium to record the world around us, homeowners of a monied milieu—kings, nobles, landed gentry—relied on meticulously detailed paintings, particularly watercolors, to portray their rooms . This was especially true in the 19th century, as Mario Praz’s An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration (Thames and Hudson, 1964) colorfully attests, with some 400 antique images depicting everything from Yorkshire dining rooms to Mitteleuropean salons. Such depictions, Praz observed with an understandable swoon, “seem to me vibrant with expectation, still animated by human warmth, like a bed only recently abandoned by the man who slept in it.” Design aficionados can experience a bit of the Italian scholar’s reverie in two new exhibitions devoted to examples of this captivating genre—which still look better framed in gilt-wood than most photographs of the same subjects.

“Impressions of Interiors: Gilded Age Paintings by Walter Gay,” which recently opened at the Frick Art & Historical Center in Pittsburgh, includes dozens of paintings by the American expatriate artist, who spent much of his life in France, swanning in and out of the finer châteaus and hôtels particuliers and capturing their boiseried glories on paper and canvas. Gay (1856–1937) also chronicled chic private homes furnished in the ancien régime French styles popularized at the turn of the century by Francophiles such as interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and novelist Edith Wharton, two of the many stylish friends of Gay and his wife.

Loaned to the Pittsburgh venue by museums, art galleries, and private collectors—interior designer Charlotte Moss and society doyenne K. K. Auchincloss among them—the paintings are romantic likenesses of elegant salons and bedrooms outfitted with carved woodwork, silk brocades, and furniture stamped by leading ébénistes of the 18th century. (Gay could dash one off in a couple of hours.) Included are views of De Wolfe’s house in the French village of Versailles, as well as Henry Clay Frick’s mansion in New York City and the Gays’ own Gallic hideaways, including Château du Bréau, near Rambouillet, and Château de Fortoiseau, in Villiers-en-Bière.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, selected paintings of interiors by contemporary artist Isabelle Rey can be seen at the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent in Paris on two select nights, November 29 and January 10.

Arguably heir to the mantel of Alexandre Serebriakoff, mid-20th-century Europe’s Rembrandt of room portraits, Rey is widely admired for exceptionally detailed, almost photographic images that have won her commissions from grandees such as fashion designer Oscar de la Renta and the late philanthropist Dodie Rosekrans.

The 11 Rey works exhibited include depictions of the Château Gabriel, the Normandy country house that Bergé and Saint Laurent shared for decades, which was decorated by tastemaker Jacques Grange in a pattern-on-pattern, fin-de-siècle mode that could be called High Proust. Especially transporting, given the chilly weather ahead, is the artist’s record of the jardin d’hiver, a sunny, tile-floored space where Victorian armchairs and a crystalline chandelier are all but subsumed by a jungle of potted plants.

“Impressions of Interiors: Gilded Age Paintings by Walter Gay” runs through January 6, 2013; thefrickpittsburgh.org.The Isabelle Rey works are on view November 29 and January 10; fondation-pb-ysl.net.

Click here to see a slideshow of some of the beautiful interior paintings included in these two exhibitions.