Interior of Courtyard, Strandgade 30
Artist: Vilhelm Hammershøi (Danish, 1864-1916)
Date: 1899
Dimensions:
25 7/8 x 18 5/8 in. (66 x 47 cm)
Medium: oil on canvas
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Gift of The Georgia Welles Apollo Society
Object number: 2000.30
Label Text:In December 1898 Vilhelm Hammershøi moved into a 17th-century merchant house at Strandgade 30, Copenhagen, Denmark. For the decade that he resided there in a second-floor apartment he painted more than 60 canvases depicting the rooms of the dwelling, often including his wife, Ida. Influenced by Dutch 17th-century paintings of domestic interiors by Jan Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch (see a courtyard scene by de Hooch in Gallery 24), Hammershøi's meditations on the interior spaces of his apartment are psychologically enigmatic. His intense, personal vision conveys a pervasive quietness and mysterious emptiness.
Here Hammershøi renders the building's interior courtyard, with strong illumination focused on an open window. Doorways at lower right, each obscured, lead to the street and to the entrance to the apartment. The eccentric and irregular geometries created by walls and windows, overhangs and thresholds, give the composition a distinctly disquieting quality. The opened window and doorways suggest human presence, but the overall effect is one of profound absence.
Here Hammershøi renders the building's interior courtyard, with strong illumination focused on an open window. Doorways at lower right, each obscured, lead to the street and to the entrance to the apartment. The eccentric and irregular geometries created by walls and windows, overhangs and thresholds, give the composition a distinctly disquieting quality. The opened window and doorways suggest human presence, but the overall effect is one of profound absence.
On view
In Collection(s)