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Lot Essay
In 1909, Vilhelm Hammershøi moved with his wife Ida to an apartment at Bredgade 25, about 15 minutes from their previous apartment at Strandgade 30 in the old Christianshavn quarter of his native Copenhagen. It was this apartment the artist would work in until his death in 1916. By that time, paintings of the austerely decorated rooms of these two apartments, both filled with cool, distinctly Scandinavian light had formed the motif that made up about a third of the artist’s total oeuvre. With an acute economy of painterly means, Hammershøi transformed spare, elegant interiors of his homes into images of haunting stillness and restrained poetic power, with a presciently modern character that remains deeply resonant today.
The present work was painted, according to Alfred Bramsen’s catalogue of the artist’s work, in 1911, and almost certainly depicts the same room as is seen in Hammershøi’s painting from the following year, Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25, sold at Christie’s in 2018 and now in the collection of the Getty Museum, as this room was a recurring motif in Hammershøi’s work in his first years in this apartment (figs. 1 and 2). As is typical of the artist, the contents of the interior have been limited to a few carefully selected objects—a low wooden piano (as described by Bramsen), a gold framed artwork hung high, and a closed set of double doors leading to the hallway outside. By limiting the objects in the room and reducing their forms to the bare essentials, with door handles removed and paintings blurred, the artist seeks to focus the attention of the viewer on repeated geometric form and the reflection of light on different surfaces within the composition.
Hammershøi's interiors have an obvious precedent in seventeenth-century Dutch painting in the work of Johannes Vermeer, Pieter Elinga and Emanuel de Witte. In this, he followed in the footsteps of the previous generation of Danish painters, including Christoffer Eckersberg. Quite unlike either of these antecedents, however, Hammershøi's paintings are not concerned with the moral virtue of housekeeping or fetishizing the objects within the home. Instead, with Hammershøi, the items within the interior become one, their strict underlying geometry and limited palette unifying the elements of the composition into a single poetic whole. In the present work, the artist is focused on the repeated structure of rectangular forms—the door, the piano, the painting and its frame, as well as the angled rectangular contours of the light from the window raking across the door and wall. Hammershøi himself indicated the importance of this underlying geometric structure in his paintings, saying, 'What makes me select a motif is just as much the lines in it, what I would call the architectonic attitude in the picture. And then the light, naturally…but when I select a motif I think that first and foremost it’s the lines I look at' (quoted in P. Vad, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Danish Art at the Turn of the Century, New Haven, 1992, p. 401). In this aspect of Hammershøi’s work he anticipates the geometrical abstraction of Piet Mondrian.
The room is illuminated by light streaming in from an unseen window at the far left. Understanding the fall and play of light in the interior is clearly the primary focus of this painting for Hammershøi, so much so that Bramsen describes it in the catalogue raisonné as a ‘sunlight study’. The angled contours of the light on the wall, defined by the sharp edges of the window frame and mullions is carefully delineated, as is the complex interplay of illumination and shadow as the light passes over the door frame and panels and gently touches the lower corner of the gold frame. This kind of study of direct sunlight had been an interest of Hammershøi’s in the apartment at Strandgade 30 (fig. 3) and it is not surprising to see him continue these kinds of experiments in his early years at his new home as he is thinking about how its interiors will function as a setting for his paintings.
Hammershøi’s distinctive short, blocky brushstrokes are particularly evident in the present work, especially in areas where he has left the work more unfinished. These areas, primarily along the lower and right edges of the painting, also provide insight into Hammershøi’s technical construction of his compositions. He has blocked in areas of shadow – in the area between the two doors and below and to the right of the piano – and light – atop the piano and in places on the floor – to be built around. The square the artist has visibly indicated on the floor below the doors as well further illustrates his interest in how this shape recurs throughout the painting. Finally, the single brushstrokes of more saturated color that can be seen in the piano provide a glimpse into how many glazes of different color underlie the subtle cool tones in the more finished areas of the painting. The touches of chartreuse, brick red, and deep gray-blue in the piano would have ultimately been built up to a finished mahogany, and the repetition of the thin glaze of chartreuse in the floor just below the piano suggests that Hammershøi is thinking about how the color and light will ultimately reflect in this area, however subtly. A similar working technique can also be found in the artist’s Self-Portrait at Spurveskjul (fig. 4, Metropolitan Museum of Art) also from 1911 and also left unfinished in areas.
As with all of Hammershøi’s interiors, Stue. Solskin-Studie creates the palpable sense of a timeless, frozen moment, charged with ambiguity and subtle mystery. ‘The continuing fascination of Hammershøi’s interiors,’ Susanne Meyer-Abich has concluded, ‘lies precisely in an irresolvable tension between a representation of concrete objects carefully selected from the world surrounding the artist and a compositional rigor focusing on thin glazes of muted color, an arrangement of objects and figures which negates the narrative context of everyday life, and a structure of lines. These compositional elements appeal to modern eyes trained on abstract art, while the subject matter carries the weight of art historical tradition. The result has often been described as ‘stillness.’ Yet the meaning of the word relates to sound or movement rather than to what is actually happening: we are made to pause in perception and absorb the enigma—and delight—of a purely visual experience outside the realm of abstraction’ (Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with an Easel, sale catalogue, Christie’s, New York, 31 October 2018, lot 14).
The present work was painted, according to Alfred Bramsen’s catalogue of the artist’s work, in 1911, and almost certainly depicts the same room as is seen in Hammershøi’s painting from the following year, Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25, sold at Christie’s in 2018 and now in the collection of the Getty Museum, as this room was a recurring motif in Hammershøi’s work in his first years in this apartment (figs. 1 and 2). As is typical of the artist, the contents of the interior have been limited to a few carefully selected objects—a low wooden piano (as described by Bramsen), a gold framed artwork hung high, and a closed set of double doors leading to the hallway outside. By limiting the objects in the room and reducing their forms to the bare essentials, with door handles removed and paintings blurred, the artist seeks to focus the attention of the viewer on repeated geometric form and the reflection of light on different surfaces within the composition.
Hammershøi's interiors have an obvious precedent in seventeenth-century Dutch painting in the work of Johannes Vermeer, Pieter Elinga and Emanuel de Witte. In this, he followed in the footsteps of the previous generation of Danish painters, including Christoffer Eckersberg. Quite unlike either of these antecedents, however, Hammershøi's paintings are not concerned with the moral virtue of housekeeping or fetishizing the objects within the home. Instead, with Hammershøi, the items within the interior become one, their strict underlying geometry and limited palette unifying the elements of the composition into a single poetic whole. In the present work, the artist is focused on the repeated structure of rectangular forms—the door, the piano, the painting and its frame, as well as the angled rectangular contours of the light from the window raking across the door and wall. Hammershøi himself indicated the importance of this underlying geometric structure in his paintings, saying, 'What makes me select a motif is just as much the lines in it, what I would call the architectonic attitude in the picture. And then the light, naturally…but when I select a motif I think that first and foremost it’s the lines I look at' (quoted in P. Vad, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Danish Art at the Turn of the Century, New Haven, 1992, p. 401). In this aspect of Hammershøi’s work he anticipates the geometrical abstraction of Piet Mondrian.
The room is illuminated by light streaming in from an unseen window at the far left. Understanding the fall and play of light in the interior is clearly the primary focus of this painting for Hammershøi, so much so that Bramsen describes it in the catalogue raisonné as a ‘sunlight study’. The angled contours of the light on the wall, defined by the sharp edges of the window frame and mullions is carefully delineated, as is the complex interplay of illumination and shadow as the light passes over the door frame and panels and gently touches the lower corner of the gold frame. This kind of study of direct sunlight had been an interest of Hammershøi’s in the apartment at Strandgade 30 (fig. 3) and it is not surprising to see him continue these kinds of experiments in his early years at his new home as he is thinking about how its interiors will function as a setting for his paintings.
Hammershøi’s distinctive short, blocky brushstrokes are particularly evident in the present work, especially in areas where he has left the work more unfinished. These areas, primarily along the lower and right edges of the painting, also provide insight into Hammershøi’s technical construction of his compositions. He has blocked in areas of shadow – in the area between the two doors and below and to the right of the piano – and light – atop the piano and in places on the floor – to be built around. The square the artist has visibly indicated on the floor below the doors as well further illustrates his interest in how this shape recurs throughout the painting. Finally, the single brushstrokes of more saturated color that can be seen in the piano provide a glimpse into how many glazes of different color underlie the subtle cool tones in the more finished areas of the painting. The touches of chartreuse, brick red, and deep gray-blue in the piano would have ultimately been built up to a finished mahogany, and the repetition of the thin glaze of chartreuse in the floor just below the piano suggests that Hammershøi is thinking about how the color and light will ultimately reflect in this area, however subtly. A similar working technique can also be found in the artist’s Self-Portrait at Spurveskjul (fig. 4, Metropolitan Museum of Art) also from 1911 and also left unfinished in areas.
As with all of Hammershøi’s interiors, Stue. Solskin-Studie creates the palpable sense of a timeless, frozen moment, charged with ambiguity and subtle mystery. ‘The continuing fascination of Hammershøi’s interiors,’ Susanne Meyer-Abich has concluded, ‘lies precisely in an irresolvable tension between a representation of concrete objects carefully selected from the world surrounding the artist and a compositional rigor focusing on thin glazes of muted color, an arrangement of objects and figures which negates the narrative context of everyday life, and a structure of lines. These compositional elements appeal to modern eyes trained on abstract art, while the subject matter carries the weight of art historical tradition. The result has often been described as ‘stillness.’ Yet the meaning of the word relates to sound or movement rather than to what is actually happening: we are made to pause in perception and absorb the enigma—and delight—of a purely visual experience outside the realm of abstraction’ (Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with an Easel, sale catalogue, Christie’s, New York, 31 October 2018, lot 14).