Vilhelm Hammershøi

Original canvas. There are no signs of retouching visible under UV light. Overall this work is in good original condition, clean, fresh, and ready to hang. Held in a plain modern gold-painted stepped wooden frame.
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The present work is a preparatory study for the artist's 1904 Møntsamleren (The Coin Collector), in the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo. The sitter was the artist's younger brother Svend, a painter and ceramicist. One of only three known studies for the Oslo painting, and the only study to feature the figure, the work offers a fascinating insight into the artist's working methods, while at the same time evoking the distinctive sense of seclusion and introspection that characterises Hammershøi's work.

Hammershøi rarely painted strangers or accepted commissions, his choice of his brother as the central focus for Møntsamleren reflecting his preference for using his close friends and family as his models.

As well as being the focus of the present study and the finished oil in Oslo, Svend plays a leading role in three other iconic oils by Hammershøi across Scandinavia: Interior with a Young Man reading of 1898 (Hirschprungske Samling, Copenhagen); Five Portraits of 1901-02 (Thielska Gallery, Stockholm) in which Svend sits with the architect Thorvald Bindesbøl, the art historian Karl Madsen, and fellow painters J. F. Willumsen and Carl Holsøe; and Evening in the Drawing Room of 1904 (Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen) with Bindesbøl, Heinrich Madsen, and Ida Hammershøi.

Testament to the close bond between the two brothers is one of Vilhelm's earliest known works, the portrait of Svend aged eight, which Vilhelm painted at the age of seventeen. The work now hangs in the Hirschsprungske Samling, Copenhagen, along with Interior with a young man reading, in which an adult Svend stands against a wall. As in Møntsamleren, Svend emerges from shadow, looking not at the viewer but down and to the left, absorbed in his book. In Møntsamleren, Vilhelm placed Svend at his own home on Strandgade 30, where he had moved in 1898. A rare night interior, the work depicts Svend facing towards the viewer, while absorbed intently in the examination of a coin by candelight, and was first owned by the artist's early champion and biographer Alfred Bramsen.