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Master of interior space

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 6th August 2008

Vilhelm Hammershoi: the Poetry of Silence
Royal Academy, until 7 September

Although I’m an admirer of Hammershoi’s quiet poetry, a little of it goes a long way. An exhibition of more than 60 paintings by him is too large, it overexposes the subtlety of his approach and makes it seem mechanical. I would have much preferred to see a smaller monographic show or a group exhibition of Hammershoi seen within the context of his contemporaries (such fellow-painters as Peter Ilsted, whose sister Hammershoi married, and the Skagen artists). This might have demonstrated how Hammershoi was not an isolated and peculiar phenomenon, but part of a tradition.

In his lifetime he was compared with Whistler, but his pictures have none of the American’s assertiveness and little of his panache. Their quietness can easily be mistaken for gloom, but it would be wrong to overemphasise their psychological content. In the first room, look at the first three exhibits: three low horizontal landscapes painted on near-square canvases. These long barns and farmhouses are so understated that any descriptive qualities are almost lost in the formal arrangement of shapes, yet this can be surprisingly beautiful. (‘The Farm’, 1883, is particularly beguiling.) By the second room Hammershoi has located his real interest in interiors, and developed his understanding of what he wanted to do with it. Compare ‘Interior’ (1893) with ‘Interior, Frederiksberg Alle’ (1900). In the later painting everything is in its place, locked in a fastidious design of horizontals and verticals, the handling assured. By contrast, the woman’s long skirt in the earlier painting comes to an intriguing pointed tail between the open door and the chair-leg. This is visually distracting, sidetracking the eye from the all-over meander that Hammershoi’s mature vision promotes. It’s an inflection that must be eliminated.