Vienna, Austria - Interiors are the most varied and diverse of all pictorial genres. Such paintings record the setting in which man lives, his private milieu, his place of work and the intimacy of his home. They depict every-day life in all its poetic detail, with all its quotidian, sometimes comic and occasionally tragic moments. Apart from the artistic challenge of creating the illusion of an interior with the help of perspective and light, they depict the reality of life in stark authenticity, through an ironic prism, or as a moralistic warning. On view at the Kunsthistorisches Museum through 12 July, 2009.

The depiction of an interior is able to combine portrait with still-life, the obviously invented with the meticulously recorded, or the legend of a saint with a mundane workshop. Using carefully devised symbolism it may employ the wealth of objects contained in a house to tell complex stories, or may focus on these objects solely to record them in order to delight the viewer with the beauty of their form and colour.

The exhibition features works from the holdings of the Picture Gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, as well as from other museums in Vienna: the Belvedere, the Albertina, the Liechtenstein Museum, and the Picture Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum (English: "Museum of Art History", also often referred to as the "Museum of Fine Arts") in Vienna, housed in its festive palatial building on Ringstraße, crowned with an octagonal dome, is one of the premier museums of fine arts and decorative arts in the world. The term Kunsthistorisches Museum applies to both the institution and the main building. It was visited by 1,619.318 people in 2008.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna numbers among the most important European museum buildings put up during the 19th century. The monumental structure, built at the behest of Emperor Franz Joseph I as part of his expansion of the city in 1858, was intended to both unite and appropriately represent the artistic treasures that had been collected by the Habsburgs over the centuries.Construction work lasted 20 years, from when ground was first broken in 1871 to the museum building’s completion in the year 1891. Visit : http://www.khm.at/