Discuss the representation of domestic interiors in the work of at least two seventeenth century artists. How is the domestic setting depicted by different artists, and how would you interpret the meanings of these pictures? .
In the Sixteenth century in Holland, the reformation of the church saw a revolutionary change in the depiction of women in painting. It saw the departure from the ethereal and .
The territory of the household and family is the subject of much artwork in seventeenth century Dutch genre art. Maes discusses the relationship between mistress/housewife and maid: As mistress is to maid, so wife is to mistress. He investigates this doubled or split persona of a woman in a series of distinctive paintings featuring divided domestic interiors with the housewife situated between the flirtatious maid down (S. Alpers Dutch Art Ways of seeing first page of the photocopied).
The economy's impact on the heavily urbanized Dutch society, one in which wealth was dispersed far down the social ladder as evidenced, for example, by the country's huge and thriving middle class. The robust Dutch economy and prosperous citizenry provided an extremely favourable environment in which artists could work, even if their principal patrons were no longer the small aristocratic class and the much-reduced Roman Catholic Church in this now official Protestant land. (The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer p. 1).
The development of a bourgeois economy and a free-commercial art market resulted in a significant change in the kind of art produced. For the first time artists were able to support themselves by specializing in a category such as portraiture, still life or various kinds, genre or landscape. Art dealers sold work to middle-class citizens, who often purchased as much for investment and resale as for aesthetic pleasure. (History of Western Art, p. 344 Adams) .
These pictures of neglectful maids and conspiratorial employers articulate social and moral relationships in the household.