Vilhelm Hammershøi

Vilhelm Hammershøi (15 May, 1864 - 13 February, 1916) was a painter born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He worked mainly in his native city painting primarily portraits, architecture, landscapes, and interior scenes. He is most famous for the latter, which are painted in a muted palette.

Paintings

Like other Danish painters at the time, Hammershoi had a great deal in common with the Golden Age painters and with Eckersberg's school, both because of his training and out of personal preference.

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Hammershøi's subjects included portraits, nudes, landscapes, architecture, and interiors. The last category, with their silent, female figures, seen from the back, show the influence of Vermeer. Perhaps more interesting, however, are those interiors without figures. They, like his austere architectural paintings, are like architecture itself, Pure Art. The landscapes, too, are formally related to his architectural views because through their simplification they tell of space and structure. Even in his portraits, Hammershoi expresses an architectural feeling for structure, as in the portrait of the architect and craftsman Thorvald Bindesbøll.

Related Topics:
Vermeer - Thorvald Bindesbøll

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After his death in 1916 his work gradually sank into oblivion. Hammershøi?s dispassionately purist style was too much at odds with the disquieting experiments of the post-war avant-garde movement. Its stridency made Hammershøi?s enigmatically sad art seem strangely outdated.

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The rediscovery and reassessment of Symbolism in recent years paved the way for Hammershøi?s melancholic pictorial view of the world to regain its place in the consciousness of the public. Hammershøi is now not only one of the most well-known artists in Scandinavia, but he has also regained popularity in Paris and New York thanks to comprehensive retrospectives afforded him by the Musée d?Orsay and the Guggenheim Museum.

Related Topics:
Symbolism - Scandinavia - Paris - New York - Musée d?Orsay - Guggenheim

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