Born: May 15, 1864 - Copenhagen, Denmark
Died: February 13, 1916 - Copenhagen, Denmark
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"I have always thought there was such beauty about a room even though there weren't any people in it, perhaps precisely when there weren't any."
Summary of Vilhelm Hammershøi
In the quiet interiors, bare exteriors, and sparse landscapes of Vilhelm Hammershøi an impenetrable riddle is concealed. He is best known for his paintings of domestic spaces, scantly furnished rooms with white walls and plain floors: horizontal and vertical planes that often meet at irregular points on the canvas. Figures sit or stand, turned away or half-concealed, perhaps engrossed in an activity such as reading which draws their attention away from us. Like the sitter to the book, our perception is somehow irresistibly drawn to these spaces, in which almost nothing is happening, but which suggest something profound and inexpressible about the nature of life and art. The bare facades, skies, streets and tree-lines of his outdoor scenes have the same effect. The most immediate point of reference for Hammershøi's work is Symbolism, and we can also trace a thread of affinity back through the Naturalist and Realist traditions of Northern Europe to the Dutch Golden Age. But in effect, Hammershøi's work stands, like one of his models, in an imaginative space of its own creation.
Key Ideas
Vilhelm Hammershøi was born on the 15th of May, 1864 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The son of a well-off merchant, he was brought up with his sister and two brothers in a large house in the Old Quarter of Copenhagen, a city where he would remain for the rest of his life. Hammershøi showed artistic talent from an early age and was encouraged by his mother to begin training at the age of eight; his older brother Svend was also a painter. Vilhelm trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art between 1879 and 1884, taking lessons from the painter Niels Christian Kierkegaard, cousin of the famous philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Hammershøi also worked with the Realist portraitist Frederik Vermehren, and thus was exposed from a young age to the great traditions of Danish painting. Vermehren himself had a place in that tradition, having been associated with the so-called Danish Golden Age of the early nineteenth century, when artists such as Christian Købke and Wilhelm Bendz depicted Romantic landscapes and interior spaces suffused with bright, clear light.
Important Art by Vilhelm Hammershøi | |
  | Portrait of a Young Woman. The Artist's Sister Anna Hammershøi (1885)Artwork description & Analysis: This portrait of Hammershøi's younger sister Anna was created when the artist was just 21 years old. It might seem a somewhat unremarkable work, depicting a young woman with a faintly distracted expression wearing a black dress and set against a neutral background. But in its very informality and lack of ceremonial significance - its truth to life - it reflected some of the paradigms of Naturalist and Realist portraiture popular in Europe and Russia at the time. At the same time, it also introduces the subtle allusiveness that would set Hammershøi's work apart from those genres, shifting the composition into a space of dreamlike intensity. Oil on canvas - The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen |
 | Interior with Young Man Reading (1898)Artwork description & Analysis: In this painting, Hammershøi depicts his older brother Svend reading in the artist's apartment on Åboulevarden in Copenhagen. The arrangement of the work is particularly striking, each object depicted contributing something to the mood of quiet calm, and suggesting the wholly incidental nature of the scene. The young man stands by the window, as if to catch the light, his chair pushed against the desk unused; an incomplete or discarded canvas appears to rest behind him, facing the wall, as if it were a metaphor for the untold secrets of the scene itself. In his focused state, the young man seems oblivious to what is going on around him, so that it appears that the painter's presence is entirely undetected by the sitter. Oil on canvas - The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen |
 | Interior with Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30 (1901)Artwork description & Analysis: In this well-known work from 1901, Hammershøi's wife Ida sits with her back to the viewer in front of a piano. In the foreground is a table covered in a crisp white cloth, on which stand three plates, two empty and one full of butter. Though the woman is 'at' the piano, her lowered arms suggest that she is not playing it; she is more likely to be reading the score perched on the stand. Both the score and the paintings that hang above her head, however, are blurred and indistinct, as if, like the discarded canvas behind Svend, they are withholding their secrets from us. Likewise, any sensuous pleasure that might be implied by the meal-table is lacking because of the empty plates. Only the butter has been brought through, and stands as "a vivid marker", as the critic Bridget Alsdorf puts it, "of the sensual appetites otherwise hidden in Hammershøi's rooms." Oil on canvas - Private collection |
More Vilhelm Hammershøi Artwork and Analysis:
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Content compiled and written by Katie Da Cunha Lewin
Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Greg Thomas
" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Katie Da Cunha Lewin
Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Greg Thomas
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First published on 26 Dec 2018. Updated and modified regularly. 
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