Vilhelm Hammershøi

Alfred Bramsen (by 1918)
Brøste collection, Copenhagen (acquired by the 1960s); thence by descent to the present owner

Viggo Jastrau, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Copenhagen, 1916, p. 62, illustrated
Alfred Bramsen & Sophus Michaëlis, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Kunstneren og hans værk, Copenhagen & Christiania, 1918, p. 108, no. 322, catalogued (as Et Gammelt Pakhus, with incorrect measurements)

The canvas has not been lined. The painting has a somewhat shiny old varnish which could be removed with cleaning if desired. Ultraviolet light reveals no signs of retouching. This work is in excellent original condition and is ready to hang. Presented in a gilt frame, with stylised acanthus ornaments and a nameplate.
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Painted in 1909, this is one of two oil studies for the larger composition (68.5 by 56cm) now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The painting shows the front of the old warehouse at Christianshavn, which stood not far from the artist’s home at Strandgade 30 until it was demolished in 1938 to make way for new buildings. The closed, hermetic character of the image evokes a mood of haunting mystery: all doors and windows are closed, and the wall cropped by the edge of the picture obstructs the view to the left. Two masts towering above the wall are the only evidence of the canal hidden by it. The idea for the composition may well have grown out of Hammershøi’s painted view of the Old Asiatic Company buildings in Strandgade, of 1902 (fig.1).

Alfred Bramsen, the painting’s first owner, was a successful dentist and collector of nineteenth-century European art who became Hammershøi’s foremost patron. So fascinated was he by Hammershøi’s work that in 1903 he sold the majority of his collection to museums and public institutions in order to focus exclusively on collecting his protegé’s pictures. By 1918 Bramsen owned over sixty oils, a fifth of Hammershøi´s output. He went on to become the artist’s first biographer and in 1918, together with Sophus Michaëlis, published a catalogue raisonné of his work. He also organised three one-man shows in Copenhagen’s Kunstforeningen, in 1900, 1916, and 1930.