The Den (C.249) presented one of the most densely patterned compositions in Roy Lichtenstein's Interior Series — the domestic study or den set down in a layered arrangement of hatching, dot pattern, and solid colour that gave the room a visual density approaching that of the Entablature prints. Furniture — a chair, a table, a lamp — was embedded in a surface of competing printed traces, the room's objects barely distinguishable from the walls and floor that surrounded them.

This density was an observation about the nature of the domestic interior as a visual environment. Lichtenstein's treatment of the den suggested a space in which every surface was already fully decorated — in which the domestic interior, as mediated through the prevailing methodology of interior design imagery, was as thoroughly covered with printed strokes as any published page.

The Interior Series was made at a moment when the interaction between domestic space and media image was particularly charged in American culture. The proliferation of interior design publications, home improvement television, and lifestyle media had made the domestic interior a site of intense activity — a space defined as much by its images as by its actual physical dimensions.

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