Houses

The Metropolitan Museum has a large collection of artworks depicting houses. These artworks provide a glimpse into how different cultures and periods have represented houses. Some of the artworks depict actual houses, while others depict houses as symbols or allegories. The collection includes both traditional and non-traditional depictions of houses, from a variety of cultures and periods.

Trees and Houses Near the Jas de Bouffan

    Paul Cezanne is rightly remembered for his important contribution to the rise of Modernism in the twentieth century.
    His paintings introduced a novel visual language of form, perspective, and structure, challenging age-old conventions in the formal arrangement of a picture.
    "Trees and Houses near the Jas de Bouffan" was painted "sur le motif," directly from nature, its view taken south of the Jas de Bouffan, the Cezanne family residence near Aix-en-Provence.
    Cezanne treats his subject with great economy:his brush marks are lean and articulated, his palette of yellows and greens is relatively simple, and areas of the canvas are unbrushed, exposing ground in patches that read as color.
    All his life, Cezanne played with spatial relationships in nature, whether working from life or from memory.
    Here the bare, attenuated trees appear as a frieze against the zones of recessive color, applied as though watercolor, not oil, were the medium.

A Village Street: Dardagny

    Corot was a tireless traveler, and the extension of the network of French railroads in the 1850s widened the range of his summer journeys.
    In 1852, 1857, and 1863, he visited Dardagny, a small village near Geneva.
    This view, essentially unchanged today, was probably painted on Corot's first visit.
   It is an excellent example of his remarkable ability to derive a poetic scene from a prosaic site

The Huis ten Bosch at The Hague and Its Formal Garden (View from the East)

    Both an artist and an inventor, Van der Heyden specialized in precise and luminous cityscapes and views of country houses.
    These two jewel-like paintings depict Huis ten Bosch (House in the Woods), the country home of the widowed Princess of Orange and still a residence of the Dutch royal family today.
    Van der Heyden shows the house amid its formal garden of hedgerows, pavilions, and obelisks, peopled by laboring gardeners and strolling aristocrats.

View of Poestenkill, New York

    Hidley worked in Poestenkill, New York, as a house painter, a handyman, an artist, and served as sexton of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
    He painted a series of townscapes of Poestenkill and the surrounding villages, applying an aerial view and incorporating clearly defined, recognizable buildings in his compositions.
    Here, the aforementioned church, next to which Hindley lived, is the most prominent structure.
   Poesten Kill - "kill," from the Dutch, means "creek" - can be seen both in the left foreground, where it passes under a bridge, and in the far distance, where it spills over a dam
   The town was an important lumbering center, and many mills were located along the creek

The Huis ten Bosch at The Hague and Its Formal Garden (View from the South)

    Both an artist and an inventor (among other urban improvements, he conceived the fire pump), Van der Heyden specialized in precise and luminous cityscapes and views of country houses.
    These two jewel-like paintings depict Huis ten Bosch (House in the Woods), the country home of the widowed Princess of Orange and still a residence of the Dutch royal family today.
    Van der Heyden shows the house amid its formal garden of hedgerows, pavilions, and obelisks, peopled by laboring gardeners and strolling aristocrats.

Schloss Milkel in Moonlight

    The Baroque manor house at Milkel, near Dresden, is depicted from its rear garden in an atmosphere of deep calm.
    While nature's fecundity is illuminated by the moon, two windows glow softly, revealing a human presence - the sign of someone awake late at night.