«The house of art» designates the creative mode in modernity associated with an artist’s residence as his own creation and product of a need to create which is not fulfilled in his «real» field. The book discusses the most important of these creations of the 18th–20th centuries, including the artist’s space, broadly understood, annexed by his imagination.

The author presents the phenomenon of ‘Hollandism’ in the 19th century painting, art criticism and literature. She discusses clichés attached to the culture of the Golden Age of Holland (e.g. its bourgeois and Protestant character, its realism and its genre character) and the modern aspects of northern Netherlandish painting of the 17th century.