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Lot Essay
Interior with a Table, Cabinet and Windsor Chair, 25 Strandgade is among Vilhelm Hammershøi’s last important compositions. Painted in 1913, Hammershøi depicts one of the four living rooms in his new home in Strandgade 25. After living in and depicting his previous apartment at Strandgade 30 for eleven years, and following two interim moves, Hammershøi and his wife Ida moved into Strandgade 25 in November 1912. The building was formerly occupied by the Asiatic company. A letter from Ida to her mother-in-law gives insight into the artist’s positive mindset at this time: ‘Now I must tell you that Vilhelm has taken the apartment in the Asiatic Company. He has signed the lease and sent it off. And he is immensely happy about it. It is expensive, but he thinks that it will be profitable anyway for him to live in a place where he can paint, and it is a good apartment’ (letter of 30 November 1912, quoted in P. Vad, Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1988, p. 332).
The street-facing windows of Strandgade 25 were impressively tall (as seen in The Tall Windows, 1913). Although cropped out of the right hand side of the present composition, they are the source of light which ripples through the painting, almost imperceptibly touching and glinting off the objects so carefully presented in this room. This treatment of light within an interior is reminiscent of the works of Johannes Vermeer and his ability to create structure and atmosphere using an interplay of light and shadow.
It is these objects within their environment which give the structural form to the picture. Hammershøi also uses the subtle lines of the room itself – such as the door frame and the point where the wall converges with the floor – to construct the quiet formation in which the objects sit. Hammershøi once stated that for him, what mattered most were the lines in his pictures. In the present work, the horizonal line of the table is in harmony with the lines of the bookshelves and the door frame; the vertical lines of the frame and bookshelves are balanced against the candle. It is this structure of lines which dominates the painting whilst avoiding sharp delineation. Susanne Meyer Abich observes that Hammershøi’s ‘conceptual focus on structure and experimentation with a set of fixed elements was arguably closer to, for example, Mondrian's gradual process of elimination than to Khnopff's melancholic soulscapes of Bruges-la-Morte.’
Typical of his œuvre, Kirk Varndedoe’s comments that ‘Hammershøi concentrated on the variation of a few chosen corners of his home, rearranging the furniture, shifting the angle of view…[the interior] is an inner sanctum of serene classical design, of fine objects filled with memories, and of mahogany furniture imbued with the past’ are particularly appropriate within the context of this meditative work (Northern Light, New Haven & London, 1988, p. 108).
The placing of each object carries significance and contemporary photographs show that the furniture has been shifted to create this scene. As Jean-Loup Champion states, ‘Everyday life becomes a reservoir of scenographic forms, a small theatre of accessories which Hammershøi disposes of at will’ (‘Hammershøi: Le maite de la peinture danoise,’ Paris, 2019, p. 155). To the lower left corner we see a Windsor chair. Although we know that Hammershøi owned Windsor chairs prior to his move, they only make an appearance in the artist’s Strandgade 25 interiors. The inclusion of this particularly British motif evokes the memories to which Varndedoe refers. Having signed the lease to Standgade 25, he spent the winter of 1912-13 in London where, encouraged by his patron Leonard Borwick, he had hosted an invitation-only exhibition in his own apartment. Hammershøi visited London again in April 1913 to attend a private exhibition of his works mounted by his close friends and patrons, the Nettleship sisters. His move to the new apartment was inextricably linked to his London success.
To the right of the chair stands the backless bookcase. Not only has the position been selected by the artist, but each book has been deliberately chosen for appearance. A near-contemporary photograph of the artist painting in front of this same bookcase shows that less precision was taken in displaying his books in day-to-day life. Hammershøi’s library was auctioned on 28 April 1916 and, as Bridget Alsdorf has noted, was considerably larger than the few books presented here: ‘At 1,052 volumes, Hammershøi’s library was not especially noteworthy in size, but it was consistently high in quality’ (B. Alsdorf, ‘Hammershøi’s Either/Or’ in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 42, no. 2, Winter 2016, pp. 268-305). Leaving the bottom shelf of the bookcase empty allows space to examine the play of light in a localised space and explores the structure of the bookcase itself. The bookcase is designed with a larger area at the base, which is hinted at here, but because it is painted straight-on, a deliberately unnerving sense of balance is created. The descriptions of the volumes depicted are not visible, but the artist has captured the light shimmering over the spines, reflecting from the lighter surfaces and being absorbed by the darker spines, working its way through the shelves of books. It is in this way, with a few books, that Hammershøi gives a masterclass in the depiction of light.
The etching above the bookcase appears in Hammershøi’s earlier works from Bredgade 25, notably Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25, 1912. Each time it is depicted as a motif rather than an accurate rendering, as Naoki Sato observes on the inclusion of this print in an earlier painting: ‘The framed work hanging on the wall behind the easel is J. F. Clemens's engraving based on The Battle of Copenhagen (1801; Frederiksborgmuseet, Hillerød), a painting by C. A. Lorentzen. However, the framed engraving is in fact not depicted in enough detail or clarity to firmly identify its subject. Such pictures within a painting were certainly something that Hammershøi would have been aware of in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, but here he may have avoided over defining the motif for his viewers, thus intentionally providing only an indistinct rendering of Clemens's print’ (N.Sato, Hammershøi, London, 2008).
In front of the print an extinguished candle stands proudly above the bookcase. Its white vertical line breaks the delineation of the gilt frame around the print, and it serves further to distract our eye away from any detail in the hanging image. The candle was a familiar motif to Hammershøi, who liked to experiment with the effects of the flickering light. However, across his œuvre Hammershøi almost always depicted two candles in a pair of candlesticks in similar placements but with one staggered behind the other, as seen in paintings such as The Coin Collector, 1904, Five Portraits, 1901-2, and Interior. Artificial Light, 1909. In this work he breaks away from this tradition, removing the artificial light from the scene, but leaving the source behind. The light white candle on the mahogany brown bookcase to the left of the canvas is balanced on the right side of the composition with the white bowl on a light table. The light reflects from the surfaces of the bowl, and the bowl itself reflects in the highly polished surface of the table top, reinforcing its structure and form.
The palette of the present work ranges between shades of white and grey, brown and gold to create subtle contrasts between light and darkness. Throughout the composition we see Hammershøi use short, feathered square brushstrokes to create an interplay between matt and reflective surfaces. As such, ‘parts of the scene only appear when we look at it from certain angles. We must take in the scene physically through our movements in front of the work. Only then does the picture gradually emerge like a photograph being developed in the darkroom’ (A. Rosenvold & G. Oelsner, Emergences, Copenhagen, 2021, pp. 81-82).
This calm study of subdued light is one of solitude and stillness. The absence of a figure accentuates the calm and removes distraction from the scene. He uses light and space to create a similar effect of dissonance to the work of his near contemporary Edward Hopper – a link which has been the subject of Michael Banning’s recent Hopper/ Hammershøi exhibition, exploring the work of Hopper within models of Strandgade 25. More recently his handling of light before form has been influential with contemporary artists, as we see successfully captured in the work of Gerhard Richter. In Richter’s Kerze, or Candle series the muted palette, soft light and countless tonal adjustments that constantly manipulate the spectator's focus similarly work together to create a serene and transcendental image.
Leonard Borwick, one of Hammershøi's most ardent patrons, described the artist in the preface of the exhibition catalogue of a 1907 exhibition in London, ‘Poet he is, first and foremost,’ and then as now, it is this poetry that viewers still respond to in the artist’s work. Scholar Susanne Meyer-Abich perhaps best summed up the artist’s enduring appeal: ‘The continuing fascination of Hammershøi's interiors 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 colour, 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.’
We are grateful to Susanne Meyer-Abich for her assistance in cataloguing the present work.