THE REFLECTIVE EYE: Slow Looking July: Hammershøi

The Golden Age, Emptied: Hammershøi’s Depopulated Cities

Kristine Benoit de Bykhovetz — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:29:50 GMT

View from Strandgade with Christians Kirke in the background, c.1908.

In 1907, Hammershøi stood in Strandgade and photographed the street he lived in. The photograph survives, blurred and damaged in development, now in the Hirschsprung Collection. On it we can see Christians Kirke, the church at the western end, the busy working quarter of Copenhagen on an ordinary day, scaffolding flanking the entrance and some people beside it.1

Then Hammershøi began to edit. He marked the crop in pencil, cutting off the church’s tower. He then narrowed the perspective, in order to pull the viewer closer, letting the church’s mass darken. And finally he removed every human figure. A city as a silent, static world abandoned by humanity was quite unusual not only in Danish but also in Nordic art from that period. Whether the emptiness is an atmosphere or a decision is worth exploring. Scholarship has mapped where this emptiness might have come from: Kasper Monrad traces the possible influences, from Symbolist dead cities to photography, but the lineage is not a reason. The question the photograph forces is the one the literature leaves strangely open: why paint a city this way at all?

Hammershøi: Back Story

Kristine Benoit de Bykhovetz — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:28:16 GMT

Before the backs, there was a photograph. In 1890, newly engaged, Hammershøi photographed Ida Ilsted and then did something painters routinely did when working from photographs: he drew a squared grid over the image, to transfer it to canvas. Standard workshop procedure, nothing to see. Except that Henrik Wivel,1 in the most thorough study of the painter we have, stops at this photograph and won’t move past it. The grid over Ida’s face reads to him as a barrier, a mesh of rational lines with the future wife held behind it, distance inserted on purpose, and he uses a word you don’t expect in a monograph about quiet interiors. Coercion. I keep coming back to that photograph too, though I’m not sure I read it the way Wivel does.

The gentler version of Wivel’s claim turns up all over the writing on Hammershøi. Christian House, in a recent Gagosian Quarterly essay, describes Ida as an essential prop, arranged within the compositions the way the bureaus and chairs were arranged, so that the lines would align. He means it as a description of working method, and it reads less harshly than coercion. Still, prop and prisoner are not that far apart. In both accounts she is there for the paintings to use. Even the tradition is a label after the fact: the word Rückenfigur, which sounds like an old academic category, actually entered the vocabulary mainly through the writings on Caspar David Friedrich. Painters had turned figures around for centuries with no name for them; Hammershøi wasn’t working in a tradition and he was filed into it afterwards. And there is a plainer fact sitting under all of this that the literature tends to walk past. A wife who sat for her husband across three decades would normally have left behind hundreds of images of her face and with Ida we only have a handful.

In Friedrich the back is a door, you’re meant to step into the wanderer and look with him at the fog and the infinite; the back exists so the view can matter; the identification move.2 Hammershøi, on the other hand, kept the device but deleted the destination. Ida’s back opens onto a wall, a letter you can’t read, a piano you can’t hear. The invitation is intact, the place it invites you to is suspended.

Vilhelm Hammershøi: First Look

Kristine Benoit de Bykhovetz — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:31:17 GMT

“Hammershøi is not one of those about whom one can speak quickly. His work is wide-ranging and slow, and at whatever moment one comprehends it, it will always provide an opportunity to talk about what is important and essential in art.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1905

After visiting Hammershøi in Copenhagen in 1904 Rilke got so inspired by his work that he decided to write an article and an essay on the Danish artist. Sadly, after about a year of deliberation the piece was ultimately abandoned. Hammershøi was so reserved that Rilke felt he couldn't grasp the essence of his art. Nonetheless, we still have some of Rilke’s writing on Hammershøi from his correspondence which is invaluable since Hammershøi left almost nothing behind for biographers to work with. Anyone writing about him ends up quoting the same handful of interviews, a few letters, what other painters remembered of him. Which is exactly why this month’s deep dives will spend their time going further. The plan for July, as always here, is to get past the material every article recycles and toward what doesn’t usually get discussed.

Hammershøi was called a “modern Nordic Vermeer” already in his own lifetime, and in Denmark he remains something like a national icon. The reputation rests mainly on the interiors without people in which the atmosphere doesn’t vary much whether he is painting a long sequence of rooms or pale light in a dim, sparsely furnished space. It is cool, sometimes genuinely unsettling, and the melancholy in many of the pictures feels current in a way that is hard to account for.

At the Academy his manners and education seem to have set him apart from most of the other students, and the quietness people noticed in the young man never went away. Add the wider mood of the period, all that uncertainty and sense of things coming apart, and you get the standard picture of a melancholic who lived facing inward. However, the record complicates this. Hammershøi was rather active in the art scene of his day, he traveled a great deal, and the longing for belonging that people assume he suffered from privately went somewhere specific. It went into the paintings, where he worked at it with real insistence.