Interiors

About

Interiors show rooms as settings or as subjects in their own right: studies, parlours, studios and palaces. They show off perspective and light, and reveal how people lived. Antonello da Messina's Saint Jerome in His Study (c. 1475) places the scholar in a wooden reading cell inside a vast stone hall, and Pieter de Hooch's Dutch houses open door after door onto sunlit tiled floors.

In the 19th century the empty room gained mood. Adolph Menzel's The Balcony Room (1845) is little more than a breeze in a curtain, a mirror and two chairs, and in the 1890s Édouard Vuillard dissolved his mother's Paris apartment into patterned wallpaper and upholstery. Henri Matisse flooded his studio with a single red in The Red Studio (1911). Robert Polidori photographs rooms in flux, from Versailles under restoration to flooded New Orleans homes, and Dexter Dalwood paints imagined rooms of famous people.