Vilhelm Hammershøi: The Painter of Silence

A grey room. A closed door. A woman seen from behind, her black dress absorbing the light, doing nothing at all. Out of these almost comically sparse ingredients the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi built one of the most hypnotic bodies of work in European art, pictures so still that critics have spent a century reaching for words like 'silence' and 'poetry' to describe what is, on the face of it, an empty flat in Copenhagen.

An unnerving debut

Hammershøi was born in Copenhagen in 1864, drilled in drawing from the age of eight, and finished by some of Denmark's best teachers, including Peder Severin Krøyer, painter of the sunlit Skagen beach scenes that were everything Hammershøi's art would refuse to be. At 21 he exhibited 'Portrait of a Young Girl', a painting of his sister Anna: grey-brown, closed off, purged of Victorian sentiment. It baffled the prize committee and thrilled the young avant-garde; Krøyer reportedly remarked that he did not understand it, but sensed it might be important. Renoir is said to have admired it in Paris. The painting announced everything to come: the muted palette, the psychological withdrawal, the refusal to charm.

Strandgade 30

In 1898 Hammershøi and his wife Ida moved into a seventeenth-century apartment at Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen's harbour district, and for the next decade he painted it obsessively: some sixty interiors of its white doors, brass handles, bare floors and winter light. Furniture was rearranged or removed for each composition, and Ida appears again and again with her back turned, reading a letter, standing at a window, simply standing. Nothing happens. That is the point. Hammershøi admitted he chose motifs for their lines: 'What makes me select a motif is just as much the lines in it, what I would call the architectural attitude in the picture. And then the light, naturally.'

The most famous of all the Strandgade pictures contains no figure whatsoever. 'Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams' (1900) is nothing but light falling through a window onto a bare floor, painted with such patience that the drifting dust becomes the subject. It has been called Denmark's most beloved painting, and it is difficult to think of another artist, before the twentieth century, who would have dared to exhibit it.

Forgotten, then everywhere

In his lifetime Hammershøi was an international name: collected in Germany and Britain, admired by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who planned an essay on him and called his work 'long and slow', meaning it as high praise. He travelled repeatedly to London, partly in homage to Whistler, whose tonal restraint he loved, though a planned meeting never came off. After his death in 1916 his reputation evaporated; mid-century critics filed him under provincial curiosities. The revival, when it came, was total. The Royal Academy's 2008 London exhibition 'The Poetry of Silence' introduced him to a new public, his interiors now sell for millions and lend their stillness to film-makers and photographers, and the empty room has become one of modern art's most contemporary-feeling subjects. Not bad for a man who barely left his flat.

Bring Hammershøi home

Art Poster Archive prints two Hammershøi exhibition posters on museum-quality archival paper: 'Portrait of the Artist's Sister Anna Hammershøi from Behind' (1884) and 'Interior, Strandgade 30' (1901). Both are available in five sizes, printed to order. Admirers of quiet tonal painting should also read our Magazine piece on Whistler's London.