Vilhelm Hammershøi Prints

About Vilhelm Hammershøi

Vilhelm Hammershøi was born in Copenhagen in May 1864 and began drawing lessons at eight. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and, from 1883 to 1885, at the independent study schools under P. S. Krøyer, whose sunlit beach scenes could hardly be further from what he went on to paint. He married Ida Ilsted in 1891, and from 1898 to 1909 the couple lived in a seventeenth-century apartment at Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen whose rooms, with their white doors, grey walls and tall windows, became his principal subject. Ida appears in many of them seen from behind, reading, sewing or simply standing; in others the rooms are empty and the only event is light crossing a floor, as in Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams of 1900 and Interior, Sunlight on the Floor. His palette was restricted almost entirely to greys, whites, browns and muted blues. He also painted deserted Copenhagen streets and, in 1905 and 1906, the façade of the British Museum in London. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke visited him in 1904 intending to write a study of his work. Hammershøi died in February 1916. His interiors are the quietest pictures of their era, and they bring that stillness to any room they hang in.