Scenery of a Distant Room - The Charm of Hammershøi's Paintings

【Monday is Painting Day】


Whether in painting or music, expressing silence may be more difficult than expressing commotion. This is because colors and sounds inherently disrupt silence.

The beauty of the paintings by the Danish artist Hammershøi seems to lie in the fact that they are filled with the utmost silence. A silence that quite naturally evokes one's spirit, or perhaps the depths of one's own being, seems to be a beauty of great value.

Vilhelm Hammershøi was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1864. He entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen at the age of 15.

One of his teachers left the remark, "There is a student who paints strange pictures. I do not understand him, but I know he will become an important painter." As those words suggest, his ambiguous gray tones and the enigmatic gestures of his figures remained consistent from his early years until the end of his life.

In 1891, he married Ida, the sister of his close friend and fellow painter Peter Ilsted, and they visited Paris on their honeymoon. In 1898, he moved to Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen, where many of his interior paintings were created thereafter.

There were basically no major incidents in his life; his fame gradually grew, and although he became a council member of the Royal Academy and gained recognition after meeting the poet Rilke, his reputation remained largely centered in Northern Europe.

He died in 1915 at the age of 51. Although he was almost unknown in Japan, a major retrospective exhibition was held at the National Museum of Western Art in 2008. Since then, he has gained a certain level of recognition, with exhibitions held and several books published.

Except for a few landscapes, Hammershøi's hallmark is, above all, his interior paintings. Specifically, the scenes of the same apartment at Strandgade 30.

White walls, window frames. Minimal furniture like a desk or a stove, and the figure of his wife Ida wearing a black robe. She is often turned away, her expression impossible to read.

Even with only these elements, one never tires of them; every piece is filled with the joy of savoring a painting within a consistent, silent tone.

First of all, his compositions are wonderfully beautiful.

He captures doors and windows head-on, dividing the canvas geometrically into nested patterns. It is a calm interior where the balance between floor and wall is also stable.

And it is also effective that such compositions are brought together with soft brushwork and gentle gray tones.

If this were done with the thick, realistic brushwork of Dutch interior paintings, or if there were colorful furniture, the composition might feel a bit contrived.

However, because the colors are also limited to hazy tones, silence is born from the painting as a whole.

What is interesting about his life is that, although his paintings depict almost exclusively one interior space, he traveled surprisingly often.

On his honeymoon in Paris, he visited the Louvre and saw exhibitions of contemporary painters. He absorbed ancient art in Italy and went to London, a city he grew to love and visited many times throughout his life.

In 1887, he visited Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, where he absorbed Dutch interior paintings by artists such as Vermeer, as well as the Belgian Symbolists like Khnopff and Mellery.

While the image of him being taciturn and inarticulate throughout his life is accurate, it is also surprising that in his younger years he was quite combative; when he was rejected by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, he held a "Salon des Refusés" with his friends and found patrons.

Also, he left a letter regarding the "Impressionist and Symbolist Painters" exhibition he saw on his honeymoon in Paris (which seems to have been centered on the Nabis like Maurice Denis and Bonnard), in which he declared, "It is nothing but scrap metal," and even wrote, "I hope it ends in failure."

And it is interesting that he liked Whistler.

A unified sense of color, a silence that is grounded in reality without including unnecessary subjects—indeed, the influence of this British Aestheticist painter echoes in Hammershøi's work.

From these various points, I think that Hammershøi did not simply paint the rooms of his house and the back of his wife like a recluse, but rather actively selected and discarded motifs to arrive at those interior paintings.

The figures are seen from behind, so their emotions cannot be read. Therefore, the subject becomes ambiguous, and only the composition of the room and the light shining into it emerge.

Furniture sometimes becomes unnaturally large, or the legs of a desk disappear, stripping away the sense of daily life and realism to create a mysterious space.

By doing so, the beauty of the windows, doors, and the light itself becomes visible, and we come to realize that we have had such a mysterious space close to us all along.

Hammershøi, with intention, single-mindedly strips everything away. To suppress the tone to this extent, reduce objects, and create a unique place requires a strong will that does not succumb to the temptation of over-painting.

These are all for the purpose of creating a distant place that does not exist—a room that is different from the space we live in daily, yet one we hold somewhere within us, a room that is empty yet nostalgic.

That distant place is filled with silence.

Silence is not something abstract. Whether in painting or music, the more abstract a work becomes, the more the viewer actively tries to read noise and tone into it.

Hammershøi's paintings, which are based on reality but stripped down to the limit of what can be interpreted, seem to perfectly capture light and silence—an ideal scene extracted from reality, right on the verge of falling into abstraction.

Hammershøi's paintings can be said to be, in a sense, extreme aestheticist works.

While inheriting the techniques and direction of Whistler, they also acquire a classicism reminiscent of ancient architecture or portraiture through an ambiguity not found in Whistler and a rigorously strict composition.

Just by painting a familiar room, one can create such a degree of classicism and universality.

This is also true in fiction, but it seems that what one paints is not the primary condition for a work. Whether it is a story or a painting, in truth, people are not that surprised by novel subject matter. That probably hasn't changed in 100 years, nor does it now.

What is important is the tone in which it is depicted, and the creator's intention regarding what kind of place they want to take the reader or viewer.

In that sense, Hammershøi, who lets us taste a silence extracted from reality, may be one of the most radical, aesthetic, and fantastic painters.

I hope you will experience that scene of a silent room—far away from us, yet one that I believe everyone holds within their inner self.

Here, I update daily with essays, criticism, and creative works related to art such as literature, music, painting, and film. Past articles can be viewed from each magazine.

If you enjoyed this, I would appreciate it if you could 'like' and follow. It is a great encouragement.