Domestic and Household Scenes

Genre paintings set inside a home or depicting an ordinary domestic activity: a letter written or read, needlework or lacemaking, a meal, a mother tending a child, a woman at her toilette or a scholar at his desk. These works record the private, everyday interior life of their period rather than a public event, a labor scene performed outdoors or for pay, or a moment of organized leisure, and many of this atlas's Dutch Golden Age domestic interiors and their later imitators belong here. This group excludes a portrait sitting for its own sake with no depicted activity, and excludes a scene of paid manual labor, however domestic its setting, which belongs under Work and Labor Scenes instead.