Hammershøi’s Women – Between presence and absence

These were the words of the Skagen painter P.S. Krøyer, who taught Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) at the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler (the Artists’ Free Study Schools) in the 1880s. Even then, the young artist’s visual language and uncanny atmospheres attracted attention. During his student years, Hammershøi experimented with the pictorial devices that would come to characterise his artistic expression. His distinctive visual language set him apart from both the academic tradition and the prevailing naturalism. Hammershøi worked with form, light, and the silence of space rather than anecdotal content.

In 1886, he painted one of the auction’s works: a depiction of a nude, standing model. The woman is placed in a classical contrapposto stance. Her face and feet are only faintly suggested, and the space around her is reduced to indeterminate planes. The perspective and the painting’s tall format make her appear almost like a statue. Hammershøi’s interest was not directed at the woman as an individual, but at the body as form – and its interplay with light and space. The absence of narrative underscores that, even early in his career, Hammershøi set the rhythm for what would come to define his pictorial world: the peculiar tension between physical presence and emotional absence.

Another work from the collection is Hammershøi’s portrait of his sister, Anna Hammershøi. It belongs to a series from the mid-1880s in which she appears as his model. The series also includes his debut work, Portrait of a Young Girl(1885), and A Young Girl Sewing (1887), the latter of which was rejected by the Charlottenborg censorship committee in 1888 – a testament to the period’s intense conflict between the established art world and the younger generation of artists.

Light falls across Anna, seen from behind, modelling the contour of her profile. The translucent skin of her earlobe is illuminated, making the ear appear strikingly red. Reflections of light also accentuate her hair, which is gathered in a tight bun. The motif is pared down to essentials, and, as in the nude study, Anna does not emerge as an individual being portrayed. Rather, she becomes a sensuous presence created by light, skin, hair, and colour. Here too, the movement from portrait to form is central to Hammershøi. Anna is physically present, yet her identity and gaze elude the viewer. 

With the auction’s third work by Hammershøi, we move from the artist’s early career to the final years of his life. This is a study for a portrait from 1913 of the 20-year-old Else Aagesen, daughter of the head of department in the Ministry of Education and a member of Copenhagen’s cultural elite. In contrast to the finished work, the study shows only the young woman’s face. Here, Hammershøi was preoccupied with her classical features. Her large eyes are directed to the right, and the inward gaze preserves the particular calm and distance that characterise the artist’s portraits.