A woman reading, a convivial family dinner, an empty room flooded with sunlight.... No genre in the history of art has had such immediate, and such lasting, popular appeal as the domestic interior.<BR>The story starts in the seventeenth century with the golden age of Dutch painting and the work of artists such as Pieter de Hooch and Jan Vermeer. The genre continued through the eighteenth century, but it was the Victorian era that brought about a new focus on the home and the great flowering of paintings of the domestic interior that began in the late nineteenth century. Ravishing works by a wide range of European and American artists, such as Pierre Bonnard, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Vilhelm Hammershoi and Felix Vallotton, reveal the many aspects of the interior: unpeopled, portrait, and the artist's own home among others. The evolution of the genre in our time challenges conventional wisdom that domesticity is the enemy of the avant-garde.<BR>As Frances Borzello reveals, although the domestic interior has always had a part in the history of art, it has never been recognized as a category in its own right. Illustrating her text with a wonderful array of evocative and engaging paintings, Borzello convincingly argues for a reassessment of the domestic interior and for proper consideration of it as an artistic subject.