Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt

This two-venue touring exhibition, organised by the Newark Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum, explored the proposition that the idea of the home as a private, virtuous, and emotionally distinct realm was essentially a Dutch invention of the seventeenth century. The show opened at Newark on 17 October 2001 and ran through 20 January 2002, before travelling to Denver Art Museum from 2 March to 26 May 2002. The guest curator was Mariët Westermann, whose introductory catalogue essay “Making Home” set out the exhibition’s central argument: that domestic interiors in Dutch Golden Age painting are not neutral records of how households looked but carefully constructed images projecting ideals of family, piety, and social respectability. The catalogue, published by the Newark Museum, Denver Art Museum, and Waanders Publishers (Zwolle) in 2001, included essays by C. Willemijn Fock on the accuracy of painted interiors against archival inventories, H. Perry Chapman on the display of privacy as a social performance, and Eric Jan Sluijter on specific paintings in wealthy Leiden households.

The exhibition brought together nearly fifty seventeenth-century Dutch paintings alongside more than seventy period objects in silver, gold, glass, and wood, organised into four thematic sections: “Home in the City,“ ”Cornerstones of Home: Marriage, Family, and the Godly Household,“ ”Domestic Roles,“ and ”Refinement: Private Pursuits and Social Rituals.” Artists represented included Rembrandt, Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch, Gabriel Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, and Jan Steen, alongside decorative objects that allowed visitors to compare what painters depicted with what survives of actual household furnishings. The final section, covering post-midcentury refinement, explored the world of satin-clad women in affluent drawing rooms and showed how domestic imagery shifted from moralising genre scenes toward an idealised vision of leisure and cultivation.

Vermeer’s A Lady Writing (c. 1665, National Gallery of Art, Washington) was included in the exhibition as catalogue number 108, but appeared only at the Denver venue, not at Newark. The painting, which shows a woman momentarily interrupted at her writing desk, is an exemplary image of the kind of intimate domestic scene the exhibition examined: a private interior, expensive furnishings, and a female subject whose activity signals both education and leisure. The Burlington Magazine published a review of the exhibition by Reinier Baarsen in 2002, noting the strength of the material evidence alongside the paintings as a methodological contribution to the scholarship of Dutch domestic life.