The term "house of art" designates the cultural phenomenon and creative mode in modernity associated with an artist's residence as his own creation and as his product of a need to create which is unfulfilled in the painter's, writer's or composer's actual field. This book discusses the most important of these creations from the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th, including gardens as well as the artist's space, broadly understood, annexed by his imagination. An artist's shaping of his own residence was most commonly a secondary area of his creative work. The formula for a "house of art" is specific to the particular artist and does not have to fit within any given architectural or decorative style. It may conform to the traditions of a residence (artist's palace, cottage etc), but most often it forms an individual case.

The author presents a broad phenomenon known under the term of "Hollandism" as present in the European culture. Investigating various areas of 19th century painting, art criticism and literature, the author explains interpretation cliches attached to the culture of the Golden Age (e.g. its bourgeois and Protestant character, its realism and its genre character), which are entrenched in art history. She also presents those aspects of northern Netherlandish painting in the 17th century which were contrary to this image and which made many artists seek the sources of modernite in the art of Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer. The book offers an insight into the complex motivations and attitudes towards the artistic tradition not only of the great painters, but also of the little-known, almost forgotten imitators of the Dutch "Little Masters".