According to Witold Rybczynski’s Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking, 1986), private spaces in households are a Dutch seventeenth-century invention, despite their commonplace nature today. A serious new exhibition and a handsomely produced accompanying catalogue set out to explore this premise by showing Dutch representations of household interiors, as well as actual period furnishings. The exhibition organizer and catalogue supervisor, Mariët Westermann, is far from naïve about the differences between sanitized, conceptual representations and the contemporary actualities; after all, this tension within “Dutch realism” lies at the heart of any interpretation of such pictures. Westermann even cites contemporary mail-order catalogues from Martha Stewart and Pottery Barn to elicit our understanding of both historical continuities and conventions of pictorial artifice in these depictions. The subtitle of her introductory essay, “Making Home,” should be taken literally for its evocation of the constructed nature of both the images and their underlying concept. In similar fashion, H. Perry Chapman’s essay on the “display of privacy” compares these inhabited but morally normative spaces of order (and disorder) to the “family values” that shaped early U.S. television family sitcoms. Both authors note the absence of men from these depicted private spaces, since...