Famous paintings of houses: 14 homes that great painters fell for
A painting of a house is never only about walls and windows. These fourteen are about pride, memory, loss and home, from a burnt-out Dutch manor to the red cottage that shaped Swedish design.
For as long as people have owned houses, they have wanted pictures of them. Dutch merchants commissioned views of their country retreats, English lords had their estates painted like portraits, and later painters turned to the cottages and family homes they loved most.
These are fourteen of the most beautiful paintings of houses in art, each restored from its museum scan. Some are grand and some are humble, and every one could hang in the house it reminds you of.
Houses as landscapes
Seventeenth-century Holland was rich, flat and proud of it. Merchants built houses along the rivers outside Amsterdam, and painters like Ruisdael and Hobbema made them part of the landscape: a roof among trees, a tower against the clouds.
1. Kostverloren House on the Amstel
Jacob van Ruisdael, Kostverloren House on the Amstel, c. 1660. Amsterdam Museum.
Kostverloren was a manor on the river Amstel, near Amsterdam, and by Ruisdael's time it was a ruin after a fire. Its name means something like money lost. He painted its broken tower standing against a huge sky, a picture about how even fine houses pass away.
2. A Farm in the Sunlight
Meindert Hobbema, A Farm in the Sunlight, c. 1668.
Hobbema was Ruisdael's pupil, and he loved a farmhouse half hidden in woods. Sunlight breaks through the trees onto a red roof beside a pond. In 1668 he took a steady job as a wine gauger in Amsterdam and painted far less, which makes his pictures from these years all the more precious.
3. A Country Home
Jan van der Heyden, A Country Home, 1686.
Van der Heyden painted houses brick by brick with astonishing precision. He was also an inventor who improved the fire engine and designed Amsterdam's first street lighting. Here a red-brick country house sits in the afternoon sun, every window and gable exactly in place.
Portraits of estates
In eighteenth-century England a great house was a family's portrait in stone. Owners paid the best painters to record their houses and parks, and even Canaletto, the painter of Venice, spent nine years in England painting them.
4. The South Front of Warwick Castle
Canaletto, The South Front of Warwick Castle, 1748. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
Canaletto came to London in 1746 and was soon painting English houses with the clear Venetian light he was famous for. Lord Brooke commissioned several views of Warwick Castle, and here its long south front rises golden above the river Avon.
5. Syon House
Canaletto, Syon House, 1749. Collection of the Duke of Northumberland.
Syon House, on the Thames west of London, was painted for the family that still owns it. Canaletto sets the battlemented mansion across the water like a palace on the Grand Canal, with tiny boats and figures to give it scale.
6. Albury House, Surrey
Anthony Devis, Albury House, Surrey, 1792. Harris Museum, Preston.
Devis was a specialist in exactly this: the English country house in its park, seen from a respectful distance across the lawn. The house is small in the frame, but everything around it, the trees, the grass, the sky, belongs to it.
7. Linlithgow Palace
J. M. W. Turner, Linlithgow Palace, 1806. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Linlithgow, west of Edinburgh, was the palace where Mary, Queen of Scots, was born in 1542. Turner paints its roofless ruin glowing in golden haze above the loch, a house that has become a memory.
8. Tabley, the Seat of Sir J. F. Leicester: Calm Morning
J. M. W. Turner, Tabley, the Seat of Sir J. F. Leicester: Calm Morning, 1809. Tate, London.
Sir John Leicester was one of the first great collectors of British art, and he asked Turner to paint his estate in Cheshire. Turner chose the old tower in the lake rather than the house itself, and painted it in the stillness of early morning.
9. Malvern Hall
John Constable, Malvern Hall, 1821. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown.
Constable painted Malvern Hall in Warwickshire for its owner, Henry Greswolde Lewis, one of his early patrons. The house sits at the end of the lawn under one of Constable's famous skies, the clouds doing as much work as the brickwork.
Moonlight and memory
For the Romantics a house at night was full of feeling: a single lit window in the dark, a place of safety, a place of secrets. German and Scandinavian painters made the moonlit house almost a genre of its own.
10. Schloss Milkel in Moonlight
Carl Gustav Carus, Schloss Milkel in Moonlight, 1833–35. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Carus was a royal physician in Dresden and a close friend of Caspar David Friedrich, and he painted like him: quietly, at night. A manor house stands behind bare trees with a single window glowing. It is a picture of what home looks like from outside, in the dark.
11. The Old Westover House
Edward Lamson Henry, The Old Westover House, 1869. National Gallery of Art, Washington (Corcoran Collection).
Westover is a Georgian plantation house on the James River in Virginia, built in the eighteenth century for the Byrd family, whose wealth was made by enslaved people. Edward Lamson Henry, who saw the river during the Civil War, painted it with soldiers and army tents spread over the lawn. It is a beautiful house shown at the moment its world was ending.
12. Villa on a Moonlit Night
Peder Severin Krøyer, Villa on a Moonlit Night, 1872.
Long before his famous summer evenings at Skagen, a twenty-year-old Krøyer painted a villa under a blue night sky, its windows glowing gold. The contrast of cold night and warm light is the whole picture, and it is the feeling of coming home.
Cottages and family houses
At the end of the nineteenth century painters turned from great houses to small ones. Cottages, farmhouses and the artists' own homes became subjects in their own right, and the idea of a painted portrait of your own house began.
13. Old Cottages at Pinner
Helen Allingham, Old Cottages at Pinner, 1890. Birmingham Museums Trust.
Helen Allingham painted English cottages all her life, often just before they were pulled down or modernised. Here a thatched cottage at Pinner, then a village outside London, sits behind its hedge and fruit trees. Her pictures are the reason many of us still imagine the English cottage this way.
14. The Cottage
Carl Larsson, The Cottage (A Home), 1899. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
This is Lilla Hyttnäs at Sundborn, the cottage Carl and Karin Larsson were given by her father and turned into a home. Larsson's watercolours of it, published as A Home in 1899, made the red cottage with white trim the dream house of Sweden. It is perhaps the most influential painting of a house ever made.
Common questions
What is a house portrait?
A painting made to show a particular house, usually commissioned by its owner. The tradition began with Dutch and English country houses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and continues today with portraits of family homes.
Who painted the most famous paintings of houses?
Canaletto, Turner and Constable painted many of England's great houses; Jan van der Heyden and Jacob van Ruisdael painted the Dutch ones; and Carl Larsson's watercolours of his own cottage are the most influential pictures of a home ever made.
Can I have my own house painted like this?
Yes. Fable turns a daylight photo of your house into a portrait in a classic painterly style, such as Monet Manor. The preview is free, and the finished portrait can be printed or sent as a card.
Do house paintings make good gifts?
They are among the most personal gifts there are, for a new home, a family house being sold, or parents who have lived somewhere for decades. A painting keeps the house long after the keys are handed over.
Every painting here is restored from its museum scan and printed to order. To turn a photo of your own home into a painted portrait, try Monet Manor, and to send any of these houses as a card this Christmas, start one in Fable Cards.