CARL HOLSØE | INTERIOR LIGHT

Enormously popular in his native Scandinavia and throughout the rest of Europe during his lifetime, Carl Holsøe studied with Vilhelm Hammershøi at the Royal Academy of Copenhagen and, together with Peder Ilsted, they formed the Danish School of Interior Painting. While their artistic ancestry is rooted in the formal traditions of the Dutch Golden Age, and Johannes Vermeer in particular, their approach is soft, stoic and with an original psychological complexity. This artistic connection is particularly evident in the present work, which places the viewer in a handsome interior, looking beyond an open door to a further set of closed doors to infer the simultaneously public and private nature of the domestic space.