Two small artworks hang in the hallway of John Currin's loft in SoHo. The first, which his wife, Rachel Feinstein, gave him two years ago for his fortieth birthday, is by Ludovico Carracci, the late-sixteenth-century painter, and shows St. Francis kneeling before the baby Jesus as swarms of saints and angels look on. It's difficult to tell, but it occurs to Currin as he looks at the picture up close that the image is "probably a circumcision scene."

Opposite this is a 1942 charcoal drawing by Francis Picabia, depicting a sexy woman who seems to have emerged from a Cosmopolitan cover. This was a gift from the couple's friend Aroldo "Dino" Zevi, an art dealer in London, before the birth of their first child (they now have two young sons). The dealer signed the back of the frame, TO RACHEL, JOHN, AND BLANK.

(Rizzoli will publish Currin's Complete Works ($150, hardcover), with a "contribution" by Dave Eggers, in late 2006.)

Picabia's influence is obvious enough in Currin's work, whose gorgeously painted scenes about the sadness of self-satisfaction often feature extraordinarily buxom women. But the work of Ludovico has inspired Currin most. He offers a look into his laptop, which dominates the kitchen island, for a chance to see a JPEG of The Lamentation, an enormous religious painting from 1582 by Ludovico that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Currin's paintings, which can go for upward of $600,000 in the resale market, are full of overt references to all sorts of historical modes, be they the sixteenth-century Mannerism of Veronese or the eighteenth-century formalism of Gainsborough, and that kind of eclecticism attracts Currin's eye. "You see realism in one figure, a harsh and almost Byzantine thing going on with the figures in the back, and the Madonna is sort of Flemish-looking," he says, looking at the Ludovico. "There's a whole catalog of styles taking place in one painting."

It's a short journey from the sublime to the ridiculous in Currin's galaxy. "The thing that I'm proudest of in our apartment is probably our bed," he admits, and leads the way to a large and nearly empty wood-paneled bedroom. The bed is indeed an intricately carved, water-gilded, gold-leafed sight to behold. It's a rococo reproduction that a French royal, circa 1760, might have slept in—except that it was, in fact, custom-made in London only recently, in California king-size, "to fit fat-ass American dimensions," as Currin boasts. He folds his arms thoughtfully and declares that he would like to paint a version of one of his best-known pieces, Dogwood, on the footboard. It's a picture of two busty girls sitting in the grass. He asks Feinstein, herself an artist and, at the moment, changing their baby's diaper in an adjacent room, how she likes this idea. "Lovely," she says.

The reappropriation of domestic objects is the most visible effect that starting a family has had on the Currin-Feinsteins. He has not had much of an opportunity of late to throw himself into new work, though he doesn't mind. "The greatest artists all had the most children," he says. "Vermeer had 11—although he probably didn't spend his time at home raising them."

"It's hard for somebody like John because he wants to do everything," Feinstein says. "He loves worldly possessions and spending time with the boys. But he can't stay up painting all night like he used to."

None of which is to say that fatherhood hasn't also spiked the artist's true métier. On the wall behind the television, in fact, is a new painting of his elder son at 16 months. He's an angelic-looking lad (deceptively so, Currin points out) with lush golden locks that bring to mind the Pre-Raphaelites. "His hair got so long that Rachel had to start putting barrettes in," he says.

"I took him to the barber finally, and they gave him, like, a Timothy McVeigh children's cut," Feinstein says.

"That was awful," Currin says. "So I did some modifications. I gave him a gamine cut with a notch at the temple. It was sort of like the girl in An American in Paris crossed with Ken Burns." He pauses to think about this description, then pronounces it apt. "Yes, that's what it was. So there I go again, mixing styles."