Vilhelm Hammershøi 'Portrait of the Artist's Sister Anna Hammershøi from Behind' 1884 Exhibition Poster

Painted in 1884, when Hammershøi was twenty years old, Portrait of the Artist's Sister Anna Hammershøi from Behind (Danish: Portræt af kunstnerens søster Anna Hammershøi set bagfra) is the artist's earliest known back view — the first appearance of the motif that would come to define his entire mature career. The sitter is his younger sister Anna, who served as his principal model throughout the mid-1880s, before Ida Ilsted (whom he married in 1891) took her place in the studio.

The painting is a small, intimate study, now in a private collection in London. Its handling is unmistakably an early work: warmer, more painterly, more frankly tonal than the cool grey interiors Hammershøi would become known for. Deep chestnut shadow surrounds the head; the chignon catches a fall of light from above; flesh tones glow against the dark ground. Yet the psychological stance is already complete. Anna is turned fully away. The viewer is denied her face, her expression, any social negotiation. What remains is a study of presence as withdrawal — the same withholding gesture that would animate the Strandgade interiors fifteen years later.

Hammershøi was studying at this point under Peder Severin Krøyer at the Independent Study Schools, where he had enrolled in 1883. Krøyer, associated with the plein-air Skagen painters, famously remarked of his pupil: "I have a student who paints quite strangely. I don't understand him, think that he will become prominent, will try not to influence him." The 1884 portrait of Anna belongs to the year before Hammershøi's controversial debut at the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition with another portrait of his sister, a work that would polarise Danish critics and ultimately attract the attention of Pierre-Auguste Renoir in Paris.

Hammershøi's reputation declined sharply after his death in 1916, eclipsed by the noisier experiments of the postwar avant-garde. His rediscovery began quietly in the 1980s — Ordrupgaard staged a major exhibition in Copenhagen in 1981, followed by smaller shows in commercial galleries in New York and Washington, and a slow gathering of scholarly attention through the decade. By the late 1990s the touring retrospective at the Musée d'Orsay and the Guggenheim would make him an internationally recognised figure, but in the early 1990s his work was still the preserve of a small, well-informed audience of collectors, curators and writers. This was the moment at which his quietness began to feel newly contemporary.

Our poster imagines a small, focused exhibition of Hammershøi's work staged at the Lansing Overton Collection in Montagu Square, London, from 9 April to 27 May 1994 — a discreet West End venue exactly the kind of place where his rediscovery was being carried forward in Britain in the years before the major touring shows. 

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