‘Vilhelm Hammershøi, of all Danish painters the most still and silent, the master of the few and muted colours, is living over in the oldest Christianshavn in an ancient two-storey dilapidated court, whose half-timbered warehouses sway in and out and where the building’s subsiding walls must be braced with heavy timbers. He paints in a large grey room so deep that its inner recesses, the winter sunshine notwithstanding, remain in subdued twilight. And the only sound is a robin’s fluttering about on the old mahogany furniture.’
This painting, which relates to a larger version in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art (fig. 1), is a rare view of the interior courtyard of no. 30 Strandgade, Copenhagen, the first floor of which housed Hammershøi’s apartment of ten years (1898-1909) and which became the setting for many of his most instantly recognisable interiors. The view is from the rear parlour, looking across to the apartment’s adjacent first floor windows and the entrance to the apartment in the courtyard below (fig. 2) on the lower right. In two further related works, Hammershøi depicts a similar view in darker tones, with his mother at the open window in the corner (fig. 3). Though an exterior view, the artist evokes the same hermetically sealed atmosphere as in his interiors: the viewer is afforded no glimpse of the sky, nor of the bustling Christianshavn street immediately outside the courtyard’s arched gateway just visible in the lower right. In fact, the courtyard lent itself perfectly to Hammershøi’s vision, being closed on three sides, literally a room turned inside out.
Explore a rendering of the interior courtyard of no. 30 Strandgade. This animation was made by www.darkmatters.dk and produced for the exhibition “At Home with Hammershøi”, Ordrupgaard, 2016.
Outwardly, Hammershøi’s view can be read at face value: it is entirely accurate and would be instantly recognisable to anyone who has visited the house (fig. 4); indeed, as with his interiors, his choice of subject took inspiration from the traditions of Dutch Golden Age painting, notably Vermeer (fig. 5), which he so admired. Yet the painting can be interpreted in other ways too: it has a psychological dimension, the mysterious black window panes anticipating the haunting world of Edward Hopper (fig. 6); the cropped composition presenting an almost flattened geometrical abstract foreshadowing Mondrian and Richter.
It is remarkable how Hammershøi created his own aesthetic world within a single apartment, and how such a relatively small and confined space yielded such a myriad of compositional possibilities, from the vistas through its enfilades of rooms to its very own back courtyard. Their silent, timeless qualities speak strongly to contemporary aesthetic sensibilities, and indeed Hammershøi’s world now captivates collectors and the public around the world. As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who travelled to Copenhagen in 1904 to interview Hammershøi, declared, 'His work is long and slow, and whenever one finally understands it will always give rise to talk about what is important and essential in art.'
