Art & Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt

The caress of fabrics, the sheen of metal, the brittle luminosity of glass--Dutch genre painters of the Golden Age were so skilled at mimicking the appearance of things that their largely imaginary domestic scenes are utterly convincing pictures of life as it was once lived. Art and Home reveals the tricks behind this illusion and gives us insight into the social reality that animates the deception. We learn why domestic interiors were a favorite subject for 17th-century Dutch artists and their middle-class customers. And we come to understand why these images of home and family, the earliest in the history of art, still speak to us 300 years later in a voice as fresh and powerful as when they first appeared. This is the story of an art that echoed and shaped the ideals of an emerging nation, a sensitive portrait of the painted fictions that laid the ground for our modern concept of "home" as the compass of our true selves.