From art history, cultural studies, history of design, to architecture and literature, critics have, over the last few decades been questioning the forgotten role of the domestic interior in the formation of modern art and modern identity. While many critical works have emerged that redefine the role of the interior in modernity (eg. Reed: Not at home: The suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (1996); Marcus: Apartment Stories: City and Home in nineteenth-century Paris and London (1999); Rosner’s Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (2004), the specificities of the Interior in nineteenth-century Belgium have been neglected. This special section seeks to address these issues by bringing a range of International scholars together to question the conception and representation of the domestic interior within the social and artistic context of nineteenth-century Belgium.