At Home: The Domestic Interior in Art
Lots of research went into this book which argues that the domestic interior should be considered an artistic category in its own right, alongside landscape, portraiture and history painting. In art historical terms, the painters Vuillard and Bonnard are always presented as Intimistes, artists who at the start of the twentieth century produced a group of revolutionary and ravishing Japanese-influenced images of the rooms they lived in. While the brilliance of their ways of seeing is indisputable, my favourite discovery was that they were only two of hundreds of artists in many countries at this time who had realised the potential of the the domestic interior as a subject in its own right and not just as a background .
‘Between the pages and the plates of this book, its author states her case for the domestic interior as a newly minted genre in painting. The historical circumstances in which pictures were painted and paid for, the artist’s climb to professional ascendancy and the loftinesss of scholars have all combined to cloud our judgement, she argues. ‘ The World of Interiors, Nov. 2006