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Lot Essay
Hammershøi’s rare self-portraits give tantalising psychological insights into the artist. It is tempting to seek answers here that might be the key to unlocking the empty room paintings for which he is famed. An early self-portrait dated 1889 (SMK collection, Copenhagen, fig. 1), certainly betrays some of the artist's personality, as Henrik Wivel attests, ‘In the same year that critic Georg Brandes began his groundbreaking lectures on Friedrich Nietzche’s philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, the young Hammershøi depicted himself with aristocratic radicalism. In the chiaroscuro of the painting, the light endows the artist with an extreme intellectualism and self-awareness’. (H. Wivel, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Copenhagen, 1996, p. 4).
The present portrait was owned by the attorney Peter Olufsen Snr., who acquired another Hammershøi self-portrait from Anna Hammershøi’s 1955 auction (fig. 2). The earlier work was painted during the artist’s honeymoon in 1891 and is now in the Hirschsprung collection, Copenhagen. In the portrait, the elegantly attired artist depicted himself wearing a jacket and tie leaning towards the viewer, an inquisitive, ambiguous and inscrutable figure. That work is considered to be a preliminary work for the double portrait of the artist and his wife in the Davids Samling, Copenhagen.
Our self-portrait offers a glimpse of the artist four years on, in 1895, entering his thirties. It was the year that he received a unique commission from his patron, Emil Hjorth. Hjorth was a violin maker in Copenhagen, and among the first to buy pictures from Hammershøi in 1890 (P. Vad, ibid., p. 376). Hammershøi’s paintings are frequently discussed in terms of ‘music and silence,’ and Mr. Hjorth, as an instrument maker, stands alongside some of Hammershøi’s famed musical patrons, such as the concert pianist Leonard Borwick (a favourite pupil of Clara Schumann) and the composer Fini Henriques.
Emil Hjorth owned at least five paintings by Hammershøi which were exhibited together in 1900, including a versatile range of subjects – interiors, landscapes, and his important 1895 large group commission Tre Unge Kviner (Three Young Women) (Ribe Kunstmuseum, Ribe, fig. 3). Hjorth was also the owner of the landscape Landskab. Sommer. Fra Ryet ved Farumsø which sold in these Rooms in October 2024, achieving £1,250,000. His 1895 commission Tre Unge Kviner depicted the artist’s wife, Ida Hammershøi, flanked symmetrically by her two sisters-in-law, Ingeborg Ilsted (married to the painter Peder Ilsted) and Anna Hammershøi, the artist’s sister. Art historically, the composition of Hjorth ’s commission has been compared to Cézanne’s Card Players (P. Vad, ibid., p. 143). This was an unusual subject for Hammershøi, sitting outside the artist’s oeuvre, and as such gives an insight into the unique relationship between the patron’s unconventional appreciation of art and the artist.
Hammershøi chose not only to complete this important commission, but to record himself in a self-portrait. Just as the 1891 portrait is considered to be a study for a double portrait, Susanne Meyer-Abich suggests that this painting was a pendant piece to a portrait of Ida, the central sitter in Tre Unge Kviner, the same year. Hammershøi’s gaze looks over the viewer’s left shoulder into the middle distance. His smart clothing is composed of his trademark grey tones, which dissipate into a grey-gold coloured background. Indeed, the light ochre tones appear almost as dappled light in his shirt. He is both the subject of the painting, but appears to be pulled into the painting itself.
At the same time, Hammershøi created a drawing which served as a preparatory study for this oil portrait. The reduced-scale preliminary drawing, executed in black chalk on ochre paper, is held by the Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt (inv. no. 1992-T.50, fig. 4). As Naoko Sato observes, an oil painting following a preparatory pencil drawing ‘is extremely rare for Hammershøi’ (Vilhelm Hammershøi: The Poetry of Silence, exh. cat., The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 2008, p. 82). The painting appears fairly faithful in composition to the original drawing, but when viewed together one can see how the figure in the painting is deliberately more weightless, the clothing less formless, the lines surrounding the figure less defined. This appears to be a conscious movement away from being concerned with form, and venturing towards abstractions. It is possible that the ochre paper influenced the artist’s gold-coloured tonal choices in the background and dappled light over the figure.
Four years later, circa 1899, the artist’s brother-in-law, Peder Ilsted, etched one of the most famous depictions of Hammershøi. This etching defined how the artist - in his mid-thirties - would be perceived (fig. 5). The artist is still elegantly attired, but reclines back. His gaze is similarly pitched to his right, but his eyes appear wiser. His hair is more unkempt, but is suggestive of creativity.
In his mid-forties, when in his summer lodging Spurveskjul (Sparrow’s Hole), a thatched cottage in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, Hammershøi returned to the theme of the self-portrait (1911, SMK collection, Copenhagen, fig. 6). This large-scale works presents a story of two halves. Poul Vad observes “though, formally speaking, the picture is divided in the middle and the two principle motifs are co-ordinated each in its half, the division does not engender a symmetrical harmonizing, with the uniform…closing at the sides, as in….Three young women.” (P. Vad, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Danish art at the Turn of the Century, Copenhagen, 1992, p.306). Rather, the left half of the picture presents the artist to us as a self-portrait, painted with the aid of a mirror (hence appearing as though his paintbrush is in his left hand). Meanwhile the right half of the painting uses an exquisite grey-tone scale to depict a simple interior. It is in the correlation of the two, and observing Hammershøi as distinctly sitter and as artist, that Vad invites us to find harmony: ‘it would narrow down the experience unreasonably if we did not also see … a symbolic dimension in the self-portrait – but simultaneously one which is inseparable from the pictorial content. In the picture Hammershøi turns his back to the open door and the incident light; but the Hammershøi who painted the picture has given the door and the light just as great importance as his own figure. Again we see an ego with simple, natural dignity, which, far from asserting itself and putting itself in the centre, regards itself with a calm objective eye, side by side with the beauty of insignificant everyday things: a door, a door handle, a bare room.’ (P. Vad., ibid., 307).
The present portrait was owned by the attorney Peter Olufsen Snr., who acquired another Hammershøi self-portrait from Anna Hammershøi’s 1955 auction (fig. 2). The earlier work was painted during the artist’s honeymoon in 1891 and is now in the Hirschsprung collection, Copenhagen. In the portrait, the elegantly attired artist depicted himself wearing a jacket and tie leaning towards the viewer, an inquisitive, ambiguous and inscrutable figure. That work is considered to be a preliminary work for the double portrait of the artist and his wife in the Davids Samling, Copenhagen.
Our self-portrait offers a glimpse of the artist four years on, in 1895, entering his thirties. It was the year that he received a unique commission from his patron, Emil Hjorth. Hjorth was a violin maker in Copenhagen, and among the first to buy pictures from Hammershøi in 1890 (P. Vad, ibid., p. 376). Hammershøi’s paintings are frequently discussed in terms of ‘music and silence,’ and Mr. Hjorth, as an instrument maker, stands alongside some of Hammershøi’s famed musical patrons, such as the concert pianist Leonard Borwick (a favourite pupil of Clara Schumann) and the composer Fini Henriques.
Emil Hjorth owned at least five paintings by Hammershøi which were exhibited together in 1900, including a versatile range of subjects – interiors, landscapes, and his important 1895 large group commission Tre Unge Kviner (Three Young Women) (Ribe Kunstmuseum, Ribe, fig. 3). Hjorth was also the owner of the landscape Landskab. Sommer. Fra Ryet ved Farumsø which sold in these Rooms in October 2024, achieving £1,250,000. His 1895 commission Tre Unge Kviner depicted the artist’s wife, Ida Hammershøi, flanked symmetrically by her two sisters-in-law, Ingeborg Ilsted (married to the painter Peder Ilsted) and Anna Hammershøi, the artist’s sister. Art historically, the composition of Hjorth ’s commission has been compared to Cézanne’s Card Players (P. Vad, ibid., p. 143). This was an unusual subject for Hammershøi, sitting outside the artist’s oeuvre, and as such gives an insight into the unique relationship between the patron’s unconventional appreciation of art and the artist.
Hammershøi chose not only to complete this important commission, but to record himself in a self-portrait. Just as the 1891 portrait is considered to be a study for a double portrait, Susanne Meyer-Abich suggests that this painting was a pendant piece to a portrait of Ida, the central sitter in Tre Unge Kviner, the same year. Hammershøi’s gaze looks over the viewer’s left shoulder into the middle distance. His smart clothing is composed of his trademark grey tones, which dissipate into a grey-gold coloured background. Indeed, the light ochre tones appear almost as dappled light in his shirt. He is both the subject of the painting, but appears to be pulled into the painting itself.
At the same time, Hammershøi created a drawing which served as a preparatory study for this oil portrait. The reduced-scale preliminary drawing, executed in black chalk on ochre paper, is held by the Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt (inv. no. 1992-T.50, fig. 4). As Naoko Sato observes, an oil painting following a preparatory pencil drawing ‘is extremely rare for Hammershøi’ (Vilhelm Hammershøi: The Poetry of Silence, exh. cat., The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 2008, p. 82). The painting appears fairly faithful in composition to the original drawing, but when viewed together one can see how the figure in the painting is deliberately more weightless, the clothing less formless, the lines surrounding the figure less defined. This appears to be a conscious movement away from being concerned with form, and venturing towards abstractions. It is possible that the ochre paper influenced the artist’s gold-coloured tonal choices in the background and dappled light over the figure.
Four years later, circa 1899, the artist’s brother-in-law, Peder Ilsted, etched one of the most famous depictions of Hammershøi. This etching defined how the artist - in his mid-thirties - would be perceived (fig. 5). The artist is still elegantly attired, but reclines back. His gaze is similarly pitched to his right, but his eyes appear wiser. His hair is more unkempt, but is suggestive of creativity.
In his mid-forties, when in his summer lodging Spurveskjul (Sparrow’s Hole), a thatched cottage in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, Hammershøi returned to the theme of the self-portrait (1911, SMK collection, Copenhagen, fig. 6). This large-scale works presents a story of two halves. Poul Vad observes “though, formally speaking, the picture is divided in the middle and the two principle motifs are co-ordinated each in its half, the division does not engender a symmetrical harmonizing, with the uniform…closing at the sides, as in….Three young women.” (P. Vad, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Danish art at the Turn of the Century, Copenhagen, 1992, p.306). Rather, the left half of the picture presents the artist to us as a self-portrait, painted with the aid of a mirror (hence appearing as though his paintbrush is in his left hand). Meanwhile the right half of the painting uses an exquisite grey-tone scale to depict a simple interior. It is in the correlation of the two, and observing Hammershøi as distinctly sitter and as artist, that Vad invites us to find harmony: ‘it would narrow down the experience unreasonably if we did not also see … a symbolic dimension in the self-portrait – but simultaneously one which is inseparable from the pictorial content. In the picture Hammershøi turns his back to the open door and the incident light; but the Hammershøi who painted the picture has given the door and the light just as great importance as his own figure. Again we see an ego with simple, natural dignity, which, far from asserting itself and putting itself in the centre, regards itself with a calm objective eye, side by side with the beauty of insignificant everyday things: a door, a door handle, a bare room.’ (P. Vad., ibid., 307).