Among the most celebrated Scandinavian artists, Vilhelm Hammershøi was known in his day as 'the painter of tranquil rooms,' as the artist’s depictions of austere interiors formed the iconic motif that would make up about a third of his oeuvre. Hammershøi’s life spanned an era of momentous change in both art and the world at large, but his paintings, with their muted palette and almost mystical stillness, are imbued with a sense of timelessness and introspective solitude. The rooms which the artist took as his subjects, painted with acute economy, evoke interiors more than they actually depict them. Their restrained elegance and quiet power give Hammershøi’s paintings an incredibly modern appeal that is still resonant today, more than 100 years after the artist’s death.
The present work was painted, according to Alfred Bramsen’s catalogue of the artist’s work, in 1888, the same year that Hammershøi first took up the subject of an empty interior. Recalling painting the subject for the first time in a 1908 interview, Hammershøi said, ‘I have always thought there was such beauty about a room like that, even though there weren’t any people in it, perhaps precisely when there weren’t any’ (P. Vad, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Danish Art at the Turn of the Century, New Haven, 1992, p. 401). The interior in the present painting can be recognized as the dining room in the apartment on Frederiksberg Allé owned by Hammershøi’s parents – the artist’s childhood home. The greenish yellow light seen diffusely through the windows suggests the allé of trees lining the street, from which it takes its name. This work was also later owned by Hammershøi’s younger brother and fellow artist Svend Hammershøi, as well as his sister Anna, who were also raised in the apartment, and for whom the picture would have no doubt held much sentimental value.
Hammershøi returned to this dining room again in 1900 in a more finished work now preserved in a private collection, depicting the same room with the view slightly skewed to the right to include the wall and door just to the right of the windows and to create space for a lone female figure as well. This later work has been much discussed in reference to a photograph probably taken by Hammershøi’s friend Valdemar Schønheyder Møller around the same date, which Hammershøi, who was known to use photographic references in creating his paintings, is believed to have worked from in creating the 1900 picture. It was quite common for the artist to return to the same interior in his paintings several times over, often under different lighting conditions or with differences in the objects populating the room. However here, both the arrangement of the objects, as with the two chairs facing one another under the right-hand window, the individual objects themselves, like the blue and white jar sitting atop the narrow cabinet between the two windows, and even the play of light on the objects in the room is remarkably similar. As such, this work raises interesting questions regarding the development of Hammershøi’s working practice, particularly so early in the development of his most influential subject matter.
Was the present work created as an aide-mémoire to remind Hammershøi of an already conceived arrangement of the objects within the room that he could refer back to in arranging the photograph? Or was it instead a première pensée created in a moment of inspiration while standing within the room out of which the later composition with the slightly altered viewpoint would develop. It is notable that the chandelier seen in the photograph hanging over the dining table is omitted in both the present early sketch and the 1900 picture. This is typical of Hammershøi, who often reduces the objects within his interiors to their most basic form, emphasizing both their universality as objects and their basic geometric form, which he then replicates to create the formal structure of the composition. Hammershøi himself indicated the importance of this geometric nature of his paintings, saying, ‘What makes me select a motif is just as much the lines in it, what I would call the architectonic attitude in the picture. And then the light, naturally…but when I select a motif I think that first and foremost it’s the lines I look at’ (P. Vad, ibid.). In this regard Hammershøi’s work anticipates not only the sense of uncanniness and isolation later explored in the work of the Surrealists, but also the geometrical abstraction of Piet Mondrian.
Leonard Borwick, one of Hammershøi's most ardent patrons, said of the artist in the preface of the exhibition catalogue of a 1907 exhibition in London, 'Poet he is, first and foremost', and then as now, it is this poetry that viewers still respond to in the artist’s work. In Hammershøi’s paintings, the items within an interior are subsumed into a single poetic whole, animated by his characteristic brushstrokes and transformed by the complex play of light on the objects into scenes of strikingly modern stillness and psychologically charged intensity. Hammershøi's paintings go beyond appearances and become instead objects which derive their power from what is suggested and omitted rather than seen.