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Interior of Courtyard, Strandgade 30
Vilhelm Hammershøi1899
The Toledo Museum of Art
Toledo, United States
Details
- Title: Interior of Courtyard, Strandgade 30
- Creator: Vilhelm Hammershøi
- Creator Lifespan: 1864 - 1916
- Creator Nationality: Danish
- Date Created: 1899
- Location Created: Europe
- Physical Dimensions: w470 x h660 cm (Complete)
- Type: Painting
- Rights: Gift of The Apollo Society
- External Link: http://classes.toledomuseum.org:8080/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/121/61
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Fun Fact: "What makes me choose a motif is as much the lines in it, what I would call the architectural stance in the picture. And then the light, of course. It is naturally also very important, but the lines are almost what I am most taken by."—Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1907 Light and lines are indeed the focus of Interior of Courtyard, Strandgade 30, but the resulting image goes beyond the straightforward representation of architectural space. Vilhelm Hammershøi's intense, personal vision uncannily conveys a pervasive quietness and mysterious emptiness. Though Hammershøi made noteworthy contributions to the genres of portraiture, the nude, landscape, and architectural views, he concentrated primarily on interior scenes, with or without the presence of the human figure. In December 1898 Hammershøi moved into a seventeenth-century merchant house at Strandgade 30, Copenhagen. For the decade that he resided there in a second-floor apartment he painted more than sixty canvases depicting the rooms of the dwelling, often including his wife, Ida. Influenced by Dutch seventeenth-century painting, particularly the quiet interiors of Jan Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, Hammershøi's meditations on the interior spaces of his apartment are psychologically enigmatic. Here he renders the building's interior courtyard, with strong illumination focused on an open window. Three doorways at lower right, each obscured, lead, respectively, to the street, to a staircase, and to the cellar. The eccentric and irregular geometries created by walls and windows, overhangs and thresholds, in conjunction with the essentially monochromatic gray palette punctuated by restrained mauve, endow the composition with a distinctly disturbing quality. The opened window and doorways suggest human presence, but the overall effect is one of profound absence.
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