Thirty years ago, it wasn’t easy tracking down Vilhelm Hammershøi. Many of his paintings remained in private hands and unless you went to Copenhagen, you were unlikely to come across more than a couple hanging together. Now, a painter who was bypassed and undervalued for several decades is everywhere and value of his work has sky-rocketed. Over the last six years, auction prices for his paintings have exceeded £4 million ($5 million) on multiple occasions.

There are three paintings in public collections in the UK, the Tate has two pictures and there’s another, a portrait of the pathologist Georges Dreyer, at the University of Oxford. It is a picture of such ordinariness that had you seen it first, you might have noted the artist's name in order to ensure you avoided his work at all costs in the future.

This was the first painting by Hammershøi that I saw around 1997 and did not see another until I visited The Met Gallery in New York in 2001 and the originality of ‘Moonlight, Strandgade 30,’ left me thinking about the portrait of Georges Dreyer.

Back in the UK, I travelled back to Oxford to look at the Dreyer painting which it turned out was by the same artist whose work I had seen at The Met. Then I wondered whether he was one of those artists that the more you see, the lower your overall opinion becomes?

My first response to seeing more of his paintings was one of relief: Hammershøi was an even better artist than I had imagined, and over a wider range of subject matter; painting hard-edged work, to narrative, to allegory, works that often both seem to offer, and simultaneously to withhold, a narrative.

**‘*Moonlight, Strandgade 30*.’ (1901/02)**

From a very early age, young Vilhelm was an artistic prodigy, his art making was encouraged by his parents particularly his mother, Frederikke who is immortalised in her son’s portrait of her which is obviously inspired by James McNeil Whistler’s ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,’ from 1871.

Vilhelm received artistic instruction from a number of Danish artists. Between 1872 and 1876, starting at the age of 8, he studied drawing with Niels Christian Kierkegaard. From 1879 to 1884, he took instruction at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and subsequently educated at the Independent Study Schools in Copenhagen under Peder Severin Krøyer who remarked to one of his colleagues: ‘I have a pupil who paints most oddly. I do not understand him, but believe he is going to be important and do not try to influence him.’

*‘Frederikke Hammershøi, the Artist's Mother.’* (1886)

During this period, Hammershøi befriended Carl Holsøe, Jens Ferdinand Willumsen, Johan Rohde and Peter Ilsted, who later became Hammershøi’s brother-in-law when he married Ida Ilsted, a frequent model in his work.

In 1885, Hammershøi caused a sensation with his submission to the Danish Royal Academy with Portrait of a Young Woman, The Artist’s Sister, Anna. Painted when he was 21, the work was overlooked by the jury for the Neuhausen Prize (it was won by the painter Godfred Christensen for what one might call a traditional landscape) and prompted a furious backlash from fellow artists who felt that his contribution merited greater recognition.

*‘Portrait of a Young Woman, The Artist’s Sister, Anna.’* (1885)

The painting of his younger sister is spare and balanced, has a clear dialogue with paintings of Whistler who Peder Krøyer had exhibited with in several shows. Whistler was much admired by the Scandinavian artists of the late 19th century, and his artistic influence can be seen in many depictions of beach scenes by the Skagen painters.

In Hammershøi’s painting we can see an outline of a door behind Anna who is staring blankly at something out of view. The palette is dominated by a palette of greys, white, brown and black.

This, and an earlier portrait of Anna, provided the thematic foundation for the rest of Hammershøi’s career: the depiction of the solitary figure, isolated in her own world, lost in thought and typically doing a domestic task.

The Danish art historian Poul Vad writing about these early works said that it is the absence of detail which makes the pictures so intriguing, they ‘contain … a suggestive sensuality which was to characterize Hammershøi's subsequent depictions of a woman seen from behind.’ (Vad, Hammershøi, Vaerk og Liv, page 27 2003)

There is often something dissonant about his interiors too; in their way they are as enigmatic as anything by Édouard Vuillard and while his artistic ancestry is rooted in the formal traditions of the Dutch Golden Age including Dieter Elinga, Emanuel de Witte and Johannes Vermeer in particular, they are wholly original and radical for the period.

This originality was a problem for the Danish art establishment. In 1888, his picture ‘Young Girl Sewing,’ painted the previous year, was rejected by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; the following year it won a prize at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.

In 1890, the Academy again rejected a Hammershøi painting, ‘Bedroom,’ a decision which led Peder Kroyer to say: ‘Can we not find a way to blow that whole putrid box up?’

Someone did find a direction the following year, and much in the same way the Salon des Refusés was established to exhibit works that had been rejected from the official Paris Salon, Hammershøi and several of his friends set up The Independent Exhibition (Den frie Udstilling) to run as a separate exhibiting society in competition to the Academy.

What Hammershøi thought of these lows we do not know: if he kept any journals he likely burned them as he did the majority of his personal letters. He gave very few interviews and the ones he did, offer little insight. In one he explained his penchant for interior design: ‘Personally I am fond of the old; of old houses, of old furniture, of that quite special mood that these things possess.’

***‘Interior Looking out on the Exterior, Strandgade 30 (c1900)***

The old was a permanent fixture in his life. Hammershøi lived in the oldest part of Christianshavn in Copenhagen in an ancient two-story dilapidated court where to a contemporary writer: ‘its half-timbered warehouses sway in and out, where the side’s subsiding walls must be braced with heavy timbers. He paints in a large grey room so deep that its inner recesses, the winter sunshine notwithstanding, remain in subdued twilight. And the only sound is a robin’s fluttering about on the old mahogany furniture.’

Hammershøi and Ida occupied the apartment at Strandgade 30 from 1898 until 1909, and during this decade its sparsely furnished interconnecting rooms, grey walls and solid white-painted doors provided the setting for some of his most recognisable compositions, and it was where he introduced a new rhythm of sensuality in his figures that contrasted with its cool geometry. Like Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Woman at the Window,’ (1822), where light hits the back of a woman’s neck, the necks of the women in Hammershøi’s paintings are sensual. The loosened hair and slightly un-buttoned dresses are of a more suggestive style of painting.

In 1909, the new owners of Strandgade 30 forced Hammershøi and Ida to leave. For the next four years the couple moved twice around Copenhagen until in 1913 the opportunity arose to live at Strandgade 25, exactly across the street from their previous home. The flat was located within the late Baroque buildings of the Danish Asiatic Company, and although the rent was costly, Hammershøi hoped the return to Strandgade would serve as a catalyst to re energise his work.

***‘The Buildings of the Asiatic Company, seen from St. Annæ Street.’ (1902)***

He spent the winter of 1912 and the early spring of 1913 in England as well as delivering a painting to the Brighton Public Galleries who were staging a large exhibition of Danish art in April. The show was curated by his friend Jens Ferdinand Willumsen.

Earlier that year, the English concert pianist Leonard Borwick had hosted an invitation-only exhibition in his own apartment at number 2 Wimpole Street, the address where Arthur Conan Doyle had created the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Hammershøi had first met Borwick around 1899 having been introduced by a mutual friend, the Danish art critic and historian Carl Jacobsen, a key figure in the Copenhagen art scene at the time. Borwick had sought Hammershøi out after seeing a reproduction of ‘Interior,’ painted that same year, while he was on a music tour of Denmark.

Hammershøi himself had a great affinity with music. In a letter of 1891, his wife Ida described to Anna his sister how she played the piano every day with Vilhelm at her side drumming the melody on the table as she played. Unlike his sisters, Hammershøi received no music lessons as a child but throughout his childhood, he would sketch his sisters playing the piano.

Borwick was a very influential patron, a favourite of Queen Victoria, he helped to organise exhibitions of Hammershøi’s work in London. His debut show was at the London Guildhall (where a banquet was held in his honour) and then that summer at the Van Wisselingh Gallery, which specialised in Dutch and French art.

In the foreword to this show, Borwick wrote: ‘the artist advances with ever more loving observation and baffling subtlety of means to such masterpieces as ‘The Old Piano’ and ‘Sunlight on the Floor.’

The press notices were extremely encouraging, it was called the most enthralling show in London and Hammershøi was called ‘the find of the season,’ his paintings were ‘the epitome of reserve and cool.’

In an interview he spoke about his choice of subject and technique:

‘What makes me choose a motif are … the lines, what I like to call the architectural content of an image. And then there’s the light, of course. Obviously, that’s also very important, but I think it’s the lines that have the greatest significance for me. Colour is naturally not without importance. I’m really not indifferent to how [the motif’s] colours look. I work hard to make it look harmonious. But when I choose a motif I’m thinking first and foremost of the line.’

Hammershøi’s final visit to London was in April 1913 when he attended a private exhibition of his works organised by his close friends and patrons, Dorothy and Margaret Nettleship. He hoped to return to London the following autumn but in June the following year his beloved mother Frederikke died. Soon after his mother’s death, Vilhelm himself was diagnosed with throat cancer and progressively succumbed to the illness. In 1915, very much weakened, he would paint only one painting, ‘Interior with a Marble Niche,’ which proved to be his final work.

Vilhelm Hammershøi died on 13 February 1916, at 51 years of age. For two decades after his death Hammershøi’s work was still celebrated and then, as the people who patronised and publicised his work died, he was forgotten outside his home country.

The elusiveness and subtlety of his art was at odds with the modern age and with the ideals of art that prevailed in the decades that followed. It was largely thanks to art historians in Denmark who saved Hammershøi from oblivion. The popularity of the Royal Academy’s exhibition ‘The Poetry of Silence,’ in 2008 and a subsequent tour including the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo was enormously helpful in finding not only a starting point for people who love for his work but a new market for people who love his work.

**‘*Interior with a Marble Niche.’* (1915)**

Just as Vermeer may have employed a camera obscura, Hammershøi used photography to help composition and so expand a sense of pictorial space, light and time, leaving an impression that is both modern and timeless. As Poul Vad has written: ‘photography is one of the phenomena that defines modernity. Undoubtedly the photographic aspect of Hammershøi's paintings holds some of the explanation of why this artist, who was so very bound by tradition, painted paintings that nevertheless belong under the mantle of modernity and still have a modern feel to this day.’

Hammershøi's influence can be felt in the works of succeeding generations of artists, architects, and film makers, including Edward Hopper, whose interiors evoke a similar atmosphere of solitude and mystery; Ida Lorentzen, and Gerhard Richter. Roll on the next Hammershøi retrospective.

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