Vilhelm Hammershøi
The painter of silent rooms.
Vilhelm Hammershøi painted his flat in Copenhagen again and again, often with a woman seen from behind. The pictures are almost colourless and very still.
Vilhelm Hammershøi was born in 1864 in Copenhagen into a prosperous merchant family. His mother supported his artistic ambitions from an early age. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and at the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler, where P.S. Krøyer was one of the teachers.
He made his debut in 1885 with a portrait of his sister Anna, which attracted attention for its austere grey palette. Hammershøi soon became a controversial artist. The official exhibition at Charlottenborg rejected several of his works, and he exhibited instead with the independent artists’ association Den Frie Udstilling. He did, however, have admirers and buyers from early on.
In 1891 he married Ida Ilsted. She became his most important model. From 1898 to 1909 the couple lived in a flat at Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen. There he painted the same rooms over and over: white doors, bare walls, a chair, a table, light falling through a window and often a woman seen from behind. Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams of 1900, showing a completely empty room, is in Ordrupgaard outside Copenhagen.
The colours are almost exclusively grey, white, black and brown. The compositions are austere and geometric. He also painted deserted views of Copenhagen and London and a handful of landscapes. His pictures have been compared with 17th-century Dutch painting, particularly Vermeer, but the mood is modern, silent and enigmatic. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke visited him and wanted to write about his art.
Hammershøi died of throat cancer in 1916. After his death he was forgotten, but since the 1990s he has been rediscovered through major exhibitions in Paris, London and New York. Today he is one of the most talked-about Nordic artists of the period around 1900.