Hammershøi’s Quiet World

Standing outside Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen is a disconcerting experience. It’s an elegant seventeenth-century brick building in the city’s fashionable Christianshavn neighborhood, a well-heeled residence bookended by the city’s harbor and the baroque serpentine spire of Vor Frelsers Kirke. But its calm courtyard also feels to me like a precipice offering a fall into another, more personal world. Between 1898 and 1909, in a quiet apartment on the second floor, the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi painted a long series of enigmatic interiors that continue to fascinate audiences and artists alike.

Hammershøi’s world is one of suggestion, transforming domestic space into a painterly ecosphere of hints and traces. Rendered in a muted palette, the rooms of his apartment are either empty of figures or contain a single woman, usually seen from behind. The woman is Ida, Hammershøi’s wife. Not that you would know that; on canvas she is anonymous and mysterious. Turned away from the viewer, she often seems consumed in some activity we cannot see—reading a letter, perhaps, or stitching a thread—and her feelings remain inscrutable. She dresses soberly in dark dresses next to which her pale neck shocks like a flashbulb.

The rooms are similarly unfathomable. They are puzzle boxes, with little ornament: the occasional piece of porcelain on a sideboard, a frame without a picture. Hammershøi limited his pigments to ash gray, pale blues, diluted browns, and a variety of whites. He was a minimalist in a time of clutter. “How much better homes would look if all the ‘rubbish’ could be got rid of,” he observed. Instead of stuff we get viewpoints—open doorways to other rooms, windows onto courtyards, windows onto windows—all of which pose questions. What’s in the next room? What lies on the other side of an opaque window?

Copenhagen—its merchant seamen unloading cargo, its congregating churchgoers—is almost entirely absent from these pictures. The most we are shown is the tiles on a neighboring roof or a ship’s mast punctuating the skyline. There is inside (Hammershøi’s world) and outside (in which everyone else goes about their business).

In fact his world was larger. In a career spanning three decades, Hammershøi also produced dignified portraits, pared-back Danish landscapes, and unusual views of grand buildings, including Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen and the British Museum in London. He even painted a few nudes. His interiors, however, remain his greatest achievement. Few artists have found such emotional potential in plain, often empty rooms. And when Ida is present, she is only half there. She is lost in thought or reading in the half-light. One fears for her eyes. But dusk seems of a piece with an approach fixated on reduction. Less was more for Hammershøi, but blank was better.

Hammershøi was born in Copenhagen in 1864 into an affluent and close family of merchants. His artistic talent was recognized in his childhood; he received private drawing lessons from the age of eight and went on to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. His early work focused on his family, including several serene portraits of his sister Anna.

“I think I will learn more from the old art than from the new,” Hammershøi noted during his studies. Chief among his influences was Vermeer, whose pictures of solitary women in seventeenth-century Dutch rooms also spoke to a specific time yet reverberate on down the centuries. As Hammershøi’s career developed, he won praise from established painters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Emil Nolde. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke called him a master of “slow” art (he meant it as a compliment).

A handsome, neat young man, Hammershøi dressed crisply and perfected the art of a sharp beard. Although an introvert by nature—being in a group setting was like being a fish among strawberries, he once remarked—he befriended his fellow Danish painters and academicians Carl Holsøe and Peter Ilsted. In 1891, he married Peter’s shy sister, Ida.

The couple honeymooned in Paris, where Ida was appalled at the appearance of French women in lipstick. At Strandgade 30, she proved an inscrutable muse—pretty, unassuming, anxious—and, just like the bureaus, chests, and chairs he arranged within his paintings to make their lines align, she was an essential prop for many of his compositions.

Life on Strandgade was deliberately quiet, but the couple took trips. Vilhelm was particularly fond of London, and his great contemporary inspiration was the London-based American painter James McNeill Whistler. Both artists created symphonies of assorted whites. On one visit to London, Hammershøi called on Whistler, only to discover that the American was also traveling. The pair never met.

The period spent at Strandgade 30 was Hammershøi’s most productive. In 1909 the property was sold to a new landlord and the couple moved away, but they soon returned to the street, renting an apartment a block away from their old home at Strandgade 25, where they remained until Hammershøi died from cancer, at the age of fifty-one, in the winter of 1916. They had no children.

Little is known of what happened to Ida after Vilhelm’s death, although we understand she moved on from Strandgade and lived for another three decades. Her widowhood—seemingly secluded, once again anonymous—was just the kind of subject that would have fascinated her husband.

Hammershøi was obsessed with the effects of “lines and light,” says Gertrud Oelsner, director of Ordrupgaard, a manor-house museum on the leafy edge of Copenhagen. Over coffee in its garden café, Oelsner talks to me about Hammershøi’s enduring appeal. “There’s something about him. He was very relevant in his own time and he seems to still be relevant to artists today. In a way his paintings are so timeless.”

Ordrupgaard has an extraordinary collection of works by Hammershøi, acquired by the Danish insurance tycoon Wilhelm Hansen in the 1910s. The group includes a picture I consider the artist’s masterpiece: a simple composition of a door, a floor, a closed window, and some modest cornice work. The sun shines through the windowpanes, creating a patchwork of light on the smooth gray-pink floor. Painted in 1900, the painting has had several titles over the years: Sunbeams, Sunshine, Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeam. It’s a study of time caught in air.

Hammershøi’s paintings are visual tuning forks. They set a tone, a temperature, that is restrained yet mercurial. The pitch quavers between the melancholy and the meditative. Perhaps unsurprisingly considering the refined craft of their execution, his works continue to resonate with painters, not least with American ones. His interest in doors, windows, and cool, watery light was to have a ripple effect on the other side of the Atlantic later in the twentieth century: similar elements appear in the pictures of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. But where Hopper’s windows framed American modernity and Wyeth’s barn doors outlined rough, hard-worked farmland, Hammershøi reveled in the contemplative quality of confined views. His interiors are safe spaces.

And now Ed Ruscha, an artist of a profoundly different time and place from Hammershøi’s—you couldn’t get farther from the peaceful atmosphere of late-nineteenth-century Denmark than the hot velocity of contemporary Los Angeles—has found a kinship with the Dane. But the connections are clear: the geometry of architecture, the riddle of sightlines, a love of the negligible and everyday. The pair have shared interests.

Today, Hammershøi’s compositions have become reference points for stories of solitude. A 1901 painting of Ida seated at the piano, facing away, was used for the cover of Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Grace Notes, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997, a story of claustrophobic family life in Ireland. And his paintings shaped the set design for the 2015 film The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper’s feature about a transgender Danish artist in the 1920s. “There’s this sense of loneliness and alienation in these canvases,” observed Hooper.

Oelsner emphasizes the importance of photography to Hammershøi’s eye. “He was interested in it as a medium in itself. This way of stopping time, that must have meant something to him.” Indeed, his pictures have the dappled appearance of nineteenth-century photographs, and looking at a Hammershøi can be like looking through a viewfinder.

Returning to Strandgade 30, I take a smartphone snap of the building. Time has moved on. A gentleman’s outfitters and an architect’s practice reside on the lower floors. Electric bikes buzz by. But above, Hammershøi’s sanctuary is still a private residence. It sits out of sight, out of time. Its own closed world. I imagine Hammershøi would have liked that.