Hammershøi: A Great Dane in Paris

He is one of the most enigmatic, the most seductive of artists. Vilhelm Hammershøi's subdued, restrained interiors are mysterious and haunting, yet at the same time somehow soothing and calming. He depicted rooms that were often empty, or in which a woman was seen from behind. Hammershøi's pictures give you the impression of time suspended. At the end of the 19th century, in Norway, Edvard Munch was painting The Scream. In neighbouring Denmark, Hammershøi was taking a slow, deep breath and perhaps being an early practitioner of mindfulness, giving us the anti-scream.

We're fans of Hammershøi and have seen a couple of memorable shows of his work in recent years, so we weren't going to miss the opportunity to get to Hammershøi, the Master of Danish Painting at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. It's a terrific exhibition, with quite a few paintings we hadn't seen before and opening new insights into Hammershøi's work. And it's also the second fantastic selection of Danish art we've been to within a month, after the scintillating Golden Age show at Stockholm's National Museum.

The Paris show starts with a portrait of Hammershøi's fiancée Ida, painted in 1890. It's a remarkably modern and stripped-down composition, with its restricted palette of browns and blacks. When the young married couple travelled to Paris a year later, the renowned art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel put it on display, but the painting failed to sell despite critical appreciation. Ida was the sister of Hammershøi's friend and fellow painter Peter Ilsted, and she appears in many later paintings, though often as the mysterious woman viewed from behind.

Ida seems not to be interacting with the artist or the viewer in this picture, and in this next painting there are five sitters not interacting with each other. Five Portraits, from the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm, is one of the paintings we'd hadn't previously encountered, and it's an atypical Hammershøi in many ways. For one thing, it's really big: 3 metres by 1.9 metres. And the composition is a daring one. The artist's brother Svend is on this side of the table, with four close friends on the other.

Hammershøi considered this painting to be his masterpiece, but it produced a scandal when it was first shown in 1908. Among the things that offended people was the pose of the sitter on the right, the artist Carl Holsøe, with the soles of his shoes confronting the viewer. You somehow don't expect a Hammershøi to cause offence, do you? This is a painting that has the dimensions and the setting of a Dutch Golden Age group portrait -- they might be the regents of some charitable institution -- but nobody in Haarlem or Amsterdam ever posed for their picture like this.

But it's the small-scale that we tend to associate with Hammershøi. Something more like this interior, showing Svend, also an artist, with the drawings on the writing desk and the painting turned back against the wall gently hinting at the two brothers' work.

The curators have taken a fresh perspective on Hammershøi, illustrating the links with the other artists in his circle. There are pictures by Svend, by Ilsted and by Holsøe, and it's interesting to see how different Ilsted's and Holsøe's work is from Hammershøi's. Both painted a similar sort of interior to Hammershøi, but what you see from Ilsted here has a little bit of a folksy feel, quite brightly coloured as if from some Scandinavian Ideal Home show.

It's somewhat disconcerting to discover that Holsøe was painting pictures of this sort in the 1880s, well before Hammershøi. This one has all the elements: the artist's wife is seen from behind laying a table. But the room seems more furnished than in a Hammershøi; it's a sharper, brighter composition too.

Holsøe's paintings are rather attractive, taken in isolation, but set one up against a Hammershøi, as happens in this show, and you can see how Hammershøi took up the concept and developed it into something a lot more atmospheric, with softer textures and pared-back forms.

It's an endlessly fascinating mixture: you look through a door as if in a Pieter de Hooch townhouse, with the light falling through a window on a woman out of a Vermeer from another street in Delft, and the atmosphere has something of Caspar David Friedrich.

There are elements of the Danish Golden Age, from the first half of the 19th century, in Hammershøi's paintings too.

Two pictures of St Peter's Church in Copenhagen, with its tower soaring to the very top of the canvas, immediately recall to mind views of Frederiksborg Castle by Christen Købke, one of which we saw in Stockholm. Three pictures in this post, by the way, come from the collection of John L Loeb Jr, a former American ambassador in Copenhagen, which is the largest assembly of Danish art outside Denmark.

We were really taken by Hammershøi's minimalist landscapes in this show, particularly this almost abstract rendering of the Refsnaes peninsula in north-west Zeeland. There's a triangle of sea on the left, an almost imperceptible windmill a bit inland and a line of trees on the right. Most of the painting is sky, the huge sky you get over flat country. It's a wonderful picture.

But it is of course Hammershøi's interiors that define him. And one of the most charming is Rest, with Ida sitting with her back to us, in a relaxed pose with her hair slightly disarranged. It's less intense, less disquieting than many of his other later works.

And in this picture of the drawing room at his flat in Strandgade in Copenhagen, it's all about the light falling from the left through an unseen window on to the rear wall. An arrangement of shapes, colours and textures from a moment suspended in space and time.

There are around 60 pictures in this wonderful show, many from the Loeb collection and galleries across Scandinavia. OK, it doesn't have perhaps our favourite Hammershøi, Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams (from Ordrupgaard in Copenhagen, currently being rebuilt; it's part of a show of the museum's Danish collection that can be seen in Hamburg starting next month), but it's a really outstanding overview of the artist's work. It surpassed our expectations and is one of the best exhibitions on in Paris at the moment.

Practicalities

Hammershøi, the Master of Danish Painting is on at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris until July 22. It's open every day from 1000 to 1800, with lates on Mondays until 2030. Full-price tickets cost 14.50 euros and can be booked online here (website in French). Be warned: It may be quite crowded in there; it's a relatively cramped exhibition space and there are a lot of well-attended guided tours.

The museum is at 158 Boulevard Haussmann, about half-way between the Arc de Triomphe and the area with the big department stores close to St-Lazare station. The nearest Metro stops are Miromesnil and St-Philippe du Roule on lines 9 and 13. 

Images

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Portrait of Ida Ilsted, Future Wife of the Artist, 1890, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. © SMK, Photo: Jakob Skou-Hansen
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Five Portraits, 1901-1902, Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm. Photo: Tord Lund
Vilhelm Hammershøi,  Interior with a Young Man Reading (Svend Hammershøi), 1898, The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen. Photo: Hirschsprung Collection
Carl Holsøe, Artist's Wife Setting Table, 1884-1888, Ambassador John L Loeb Jr Danish Art Collection. © TX0006154704, registered March 22, 2005
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with a Woman Standing, undated, Ambassador John L Loeb Jr Danish Art Collection. © TX0006154704, registered March 22, 2005
Vilhelm Hammershøi, The Church of St Peter, Copenhagen, 1906, Ambassador John L Loeb Jr Danish Art Collection © TX0006154704, registered March 22, 2005
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Landscape, 1900, Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm. Photo: Tord Lund

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Hvile (Rest), 1905, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)/René-Gabriel Ojéda

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Sunshine in the Drawing Room III, 1903, National Museum, Stockholm. Photo: Erik Cornelius/National Museum