The son of a prosperous merchant, Hammershøi trained in Copenhagen, making his debut at the Royal Academy’s Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition in 1885. He traveled and exhibited widely, his austerely constructed interior views earning him fame as the “Poet of Light – of Quietude – of the Home” (quoted in Felix Krämer et al.,
Hammershøi, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2008, p. 18). The German Expressionist painter Emil Nolde visited him in his Copenhagen apartment in 1900 and commented upon the tranquility of his life, as did the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who visited him in 1904, intending to write an essay about his paintings (Vad 1992, pp. 271–78, 404–6). Although Hammershøi’s reputation declined after World War I, from the 1950s there has been a resurgence of interest in his work, the formal purity and simplicity of which can now be seen to herald a new conception of painting.
The Met’s picture shows a parlor in the apartment that Hammershøi shared with his wife Ida at Strandgade 30 in the historic inner city of Copenhagen. From 1898 until 1909, this apartment served as Hammershøi’s studio. Its rooms inspired the development of his defining subject matter: the interaction of architecture and light (Vad 1992, pp. 178–211).
Hammershøi’s second-floor apartment was arranged in a “u” shape around a central courtyard with light entering from different directions. The parlor was situated near the back of the building along one side of the “u” (see fig. 1 above); the view through the glass panes is not of the outside world, but of a windowed loggia, reached by the door at right and facing the courtyard. Between 1900 and 1909 Hammershøi painted more than ten versions of this vista at different times of day. Some show a figure, generally Ida, to the left of the window (one such example is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Others, like the present work, depict an empty interior, emphasizing the geometric patterns of the window and door and the shifting effects of light. A closely related composition showing the room in morning sunshine dates from 1900 (Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund); another, dating from 1906, shows the room at noon (Davids Samling, Copenhagen). The Met’s picture is not signed or dated, and its moment of execution is uncertain. The first attempts to date the picture, made when it surfaced on the art market in the mid-1980s, situated it around 1900–1905; more recent scholars tentatively assign it to 1906 (Vad 1988; Vad 1992; Meyer-Abich 1995).
Hammershøi produced a number of nocturnes in the first two decades of his career (see The Met,
2012.377), but The Met’s picture appears unusual in that it depicts moonbeams rather than artificial light. Hammershøi conveyed the quality of nighttime vision by painting the interior a deep lavender hue; the walls and ceilings of the apartment were actually gray, and the doors, window frames, and moldings were white, but in the artist’s work they take on a range of tints, from green to gray-blue and brown. Although rich in tone, the palette of this picture is characteristic in its restraint. Also typical is the spartan state of the interior, although the complete elimination of furnishings in this painting and its counterparts in Denmark is notable.
Alison Hokanson 2015
