Behind Closed Doors

This critical history of elite domestic life in colonial Spanish America offers a fresh perspective on the domestic arts that flourished in Spain’s overseas territories from the late fifteenth through nineteenth centuries. Drawing principally on the Brooklyn Museum's renowned colonial holdings, among the country’s finest, this book presents magnificent domestic works for the first time in a broad New World (Spanish and British) context. In the essays within, the authors lead the reader through the elite Spanish American home, illuminating along the way a dazzling range of both imported and domestic household goods. A critical contribution to the burgeoning field of Spanish colonial art, Behind Closed Doors brings to light how art and luxury goods together signaled the identity and status of Spanish Americans struggling to claim their place in a fluid New World hierarchy.