Paintings of houses go back a long way in British art: the earliest landscape in Tate Britain is a late 17th-century view of an estate in Belsize Park by the inventor of the country-house portrait, Jan Siberechts. The genre quickly became déclassé. By the 18th century Thomas Gainsborough was painting peasant cottages; by the 20th, Algernon Newton had turned his attention to middle-class villas on London’s canals.
Not made for the owners of the houses they depicted, these paintings were destined to decorate the walls of strangers: the householders might not even know the pictures had been ‘taken’. A commissioned house portrait has legitimacy; a non-commissioned one feels like an invasion of privacy. A house portrait painted on spec invites speculation, encouraging nosiness about the occupants. Windows screened by reflections invite prying eyes, bringing out the net curtain-twitcher in us: a sotto in su perspective on bedroom windows could almost be classed as architectural upskirting.
A painting suggests so much more than a photograph. When an artist has taken the trouble to paint something, we imagine there must be a reason, and so an anonymous façade captured on canvas can easily acquire the frisson of a crime scene. Edward Hopper’s ‘House by a Railroad’ was perfectly innocent until Hitchcock rebuilt it on the set of Psycho.
This suspicion explains the slightly creepy air of Millennium Gallery’s exhibition Where We Live. The show was the brainchild of the artist Trevor Burgess, who 20 years ago developed a fascination with property ads in London papers and started pasting them into a sketchbook. He liked the muzzy newsprint and the way accidental elements — the shadow of a building opposite, the reflection of unseen trees in windows — subverted the commercial purpose of the ads; there was more to their banality, he felt, than met the eye.
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