People at Home

About

Scenes of people at home became a genre of their own in the Dutch Republic. Johannes Vermeer's The Milkmaid (c. 1658) pours milk in a whitewashed kitchen, and Pieter de Hooch opened doorways onto rooms beyond rooms. Jean-Siméon Chardin brought the same attention to French households in Saying Grace (1740), where a mother waits as her youngest child recites a prayer.

Around 1900 Édouard Vuillard painted his mother and sister among patterned wallpapers until figures and furnishings merge, and Vilhelm Hammershøi turned the grey rooms of his Copenhagen apartment into studies of quiet. Photographers came closer still. Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series (1990) stages a woman's relationships around one table under a hanging lamp, and Richard Billingham's Ray's a Laugh (1996) records daily life with his parents in their small flat. Look for open doors, unmade beds and the objects that show how a household lives.