At Home: The Domestic Interior in Art

No genre in the history of art has such immediate, and such lasting, popular appeal as the domestic interior, shown here in more than 150 paintings. And yet behind these evocative scenes lies an important reassessment. The domestic interior has had a hidden life in the history of art, and Frances Borzello, in a delightfully written text, shows why it has misleadingly been neglected as a category in art.

The story starts with the interiors of the Dutch artists of the seventeenth century and takes in a long period in which the interior was frowned upon or ignored by the rules of artistic propriety. During the nineteenth century social and economic change encouraged new concentration on depicting the home environment, culminating in the interior’s greatest golden age in the late nineteenth century. The evolution of the genre in our own time challenges conventional wisdom that domesticity was the enemy of the avant-garde.

The book includes reproductions of ravishing works by more than 100 artists, from Maes and Vermeer to Sargent, Bonnard, and Cassatt to Hopper and Tanning. 160 color illustrations.