The painting that lost its home
What we lost when we put paintings in museums
This essay is about how paintings were made to live with. Not to be stared at in silence, or to be locked behind glass. And certainly not to be turned into merchandise.
Art was made to be lived with. Not to be visited, or explained. It has always been part of the texture of life. Seen in the morning light, passed without thought in the afternoon, noticed anew at night.
Museums may have saved paintings from being lost, but in doing so, they destroyed the world that gave them meaning.
When art was removed from the home, its soul was severed from its body. What was once integrated into the rhythm of domestic life is now encased in glass, framed with context, and sold back to us on a tote bag. We preserved the object and obliterated its purpose. Even most churches nowadays are rather museums than actual places of worship.
Walk through any modern Dutch house and you will likely not find a single painting. You will find white walls, maybe a poster from a museum exhibition, purchased years ago and never reframed. But more likely an IKEA print, some digestible abstract shape, or a minimalist line drawing meant to project ‘taste’ without expressing anything. But more often, there’s no art at all.
People spend thousands on kitchen renovations and car leases. They subscribe to Spotify, Netflix, and gym memberships they do not use. Yet the thought of commissioning a painting for their home seems absurd. ‘Too expensive!’
And so they go to museums instead. They shuffle through exhibition halls in silent reverence. They pause in front of paintings for 30 seconds at a time, looking, but not seeing. They read the placard, and open the museum app. They take a picture for their Instagram story, for proof of cultural participation, and then move on.
One of the most photographed paintings is Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch. A small panel. 33.5 by 22.8 centimetres. It shows a European goldfinch, chained to a wooden feeding box. They look at it, nod, and return to their homes with blank walls.
The Purpose of the Goldfinch
Fabritius came out of a world in which painting was not a province of genius but rather the result of group mastery.
He was born in 1622 in Middenbeemster. His father was a schoolteacher and painter. And Fabritius first trained as a carpenter (fabritius being the Latin word for that profession) before apprenticing under Rembrandt in Amsterdam in the 1640s.
An apprenticeship in a master’s studio lasted between 4 to 6 years. The family paid for instruction, which was often between 20 and 100 guilders annually, and not including food or lodging.
The apprentice cleaned the studio, ground pigments by hand, stretched canvases, and prepared palettes. Paint at that time came not in tubes but as raw material to be ground and mixed. As an apprentice’s skill developed, he might contribute to minor areas of the master’s work: a tree, a sleeve, a curtain. Although the copyright belonged to the master.
After years of labour, an apprentice could submit a masterpiece to a local guild. Which was often called: The Guild of Saint Luke (E.g. in Gouda, Haarlem, Delft, Rotterdam, Bruges, Antwerp). If his art was accepted, he became a master himself. And was permitted to sign his name, sell work, and take on apprentices of his own.
The guild system produced more than competence. It created order: a hierarchy of skill, a standard of excellence, and a way of situating craft within the social fabric.
Fabritius joined the Guild in Delft in 1652. Unlike most of Rembrandt’s students, he developed a unique style: light backgrounds, soft textures, and delicate use of colour to suggest spatial complexity. He was fascinated with visual perception and painterly illusion. The Goldfinch is a technical marvel, not because it was grand, but because it is both exact and playful.
He sadly died 12 October 1654, when a gunpowder warehouse exploded in Delft. Which destroyed a quarter of the city. Fabritius died in his workshop, aged 32. Most of his work vanished in the blast. And only a dozen paintings of him remain, including The Goldfinch.
Domestic Art in the Lowlands
Painting in the Dutch Golden Age was made for homes, because Calvinism abolished church art.
A merchant in Amsterdam could commission a landscape for his receiving room. A still life for the dining room. And a moralising genre scene for his wife’s sitting room.
Every painting was measured for its place. And painters knew what room it would hang in, how the light entered, what objects would surround it. A trompe-l’œil like The Goldfinch was made to work under these precise conditions. It was art meant for a specific space. And it functioned as an integrated part of that space.
Viewers did not come to visit paintings, but they lived with them. You would pass by the same image ten times a day. You would begin to see its details differently over time. The seasons would change the tone of the light. And your mood would shift the feeling of the work. It was not art consumption, but a coexistence with it.
Both the Lowlands and Japanese share similar traditions in this, where Japanese changed their art with the seasons, the richness of light in Dutch art, reflected the time of the year. A Vermeer painting adjusts to the golden hour, the daytime and season.
But through artificial lightning and paintings being hung in museums, that entire relationship is now dead.
What the Museum Did
In no way do I want to hate on museums, which originated from rich art collectors. They saved many paintings from being lost forever. But they have extracted painting from the one environment in which it made sense.
When The Goldfinch resurfaced in 1859, it was no longer in a Dutch parlour. It had become a collector’s object: part of a private European art collection. Later it became a museum piece. Because in 1896 it was acquired by the Mauritshuis, which had been transformed into a public institution. The painting now belonged to the state.
It was presented as a democratic gesture: art for the people, not only for the rich. But in practice, it replaced a form of intimacy with another kind of exclusion. The work was no longer private, but it also no longer domestic either. It became sacred in the secular sense of ‘protected,’ ‘valuable,’ and ‘important.’ A relic of culture to be visited, venerated and commercialised.
The museum placed The Goldfinch in a climate-controlled white room, behind glass, flanked by security, tagged with an accession number. It is still a painting, but it no longer functioned as one.
A painting is just oil on a panel. It is situated in a place, seen repeatedly over time: in ordinary light, among other things, for the sake of delight. But museums erased all of that.
From Painting to Product
In 2013, Donna Tartt published her novel The Goldfinch. Fabritius’ painting suddenly became world famous. Yet… not as a painting, but as a literary reference, a plot device, and a brand.
Visitors queued outside the Mauritshuis to see ‘the painting from the book.’ They took selfies, bought postcards, posters, and other kitsch souvenirs.
But when they returned home, they were not changed. Their homes remained as boring as before.
Which is the final absurdity. We now have a culture in which people will stand in line to view a 17th-century painting that was made for someone’s home, only to never develop any taste of their own. And worse: not own any art themselves.
The problem is not just the loss of beauty. It’s the loss of memory: of what it was for. We love to admire stuff, but even revivalists can’t remake it.
The Work of Restoration
So what do we do now? The guilds are no longer there. We have no patron system anymore. The training is fractured, and the domestic context has been obliterated.
The answer is not to visit museums and galleries more often. We need to stop outsourcing beauty. Stop treating art like sacred objects reserved for expert preservation. And stop accepting that your house should be white, grey, and full of mass-produced sentimentality.
Commission art. Develop a taste, and live with it. Art might age, and might fade, but that’s how it will become part of your life’s texture. Beauty shouldn’t be a commodity to be visited. Beauty is a condition to be inhabited.
Historically, the Dutch understood this. That is why they spent what they had on paintings to furnish their souls.
We saved the painting, but killed the world it belonged to. Stop making pilgrimages to seek beauty, and bring it home.
— Robbert
Further Reading:
“The Goldfinch” (painting) - Wikipedia: Historical details about Fabritius’s painting, its provenance, and technical analysis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldfinch_(painting)“The Engagement of Carel Fabritius’ Goldfinch with the Dutch Window” - Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art: Scholarly analysis of the painting’s original function
https://jhna.org/articles/engagement-carel-fabritius-goldfinch-1654-dutch-window-significant-site-neighborhood-social-exchange/“Guilds and the Development of the Art Market during the Dutch Golden Age” - Simiolus: Economic history of Dutch guild system and art market
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3780991“The Amsterdam Guild of Saint Luke in the 17th Century” - Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art: Detailed examination of guild structure and membership
https://jhna.org/articles/amsterdam-guild-of-saint-luke-17th-century/“The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt (2013): The novel that transformed the painting into a cultural phenomenon
Mauritshuis Museum website: Official museum information including visitor numbers and expansion details
https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/“Carel Fabritius: pupil of Rembrandt, painter of ‘The Goldfinch’” - Art UK: Biography and analysis of Fabritius’s brief career
https://artuk.org/discover/stories/carel-fabritius-pupil-of-rembrandt-painter-of-the-goldfinch“Dutch Golden Age painting” - Wikipedia: Overview of the period, market structure, and production scale
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Golden_Age_painting“Apprenticeships and craft guilds in the Netherlands, 1600-1900”: Academic analysis of Dutch guild training system
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310365470“What Does Donna Tartt Think About ‘The Goldfinch’?” - Town & Country: Interview about the novel’s creation and the Frick exhibition coincidence
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a29022016/donna-tartt-goldfinch-interview/
On the airplane with an art history teacher who just went to the wonderful biennale in Venice, I asked if she ever bought art for her home. The answer was no, but sometimes students give me their artworks. Sic.
Marvelous essay. While I fully enjoy art museums, the art in my home is what I cherish every day. A dear friend made a watercolor painting of persimmons for my birthday a few years back. It’s situated such that I see it multiple times per day. Went to Amsterdam in 2024, and went to 2 museums every day. Unbelievable.