Vilhelm Hammershøi (b. Copenhagen 1864, d. s.p. 1916) Portrait of the artist's...

Vilhelm Hammershøi (b. Copenhagen 1864, d. s.p. 1916)

Portrait of the artist's sister Anna Hammershøi. 1883. Unsigned. Oil on canvas. 33×28 cm.

Alfred Bramsen, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Vilhelm Hammershøi “Vilhelm Hammershøi. Kunstneren og hans værk”, 1918, no. 12 with the following title and the description (in Danish):

“Portrait head. The 15-year-old Anna Hammershøi. Profile to the left. Smaller than life size.”

Susanne Meyer-Abich, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Vilhelm Hammershøi in “Vilhelm Hammershøi: Das Malerische Werk", 1995, no. 18.

Exhibited: Kunstforeningen, “Fortegnelse over arbejder af Vilhelm Hammershøi”, 1916, 1. section, no. 11.

Provenance: Anna Hammershøi, her estate auction Bruun Rasmussen 61, 1955, no. 180. Here acquired by the family of the present owner.

Anna Hammershøi (1866–1955) was Vilhelm Hammershøi's sister. Together with his brother and mother, she was his preferred model until he married Ida Ilsted (1869–1949) in 1891 – who subsequently became the preferred model for the artist. The present portrait was painted while the family lived at Frederiksberg Allé 34 in Frederiksberg, where Hammershøi lived in the period 1871–1891 and was married to Ida, with whom he moved to Rahbeks Allé 26 also in Frederiksberg.

Hammershøi was very close with his immediate family: his youngest brother, the artist Svend Hammershøi (1873–1948), his mother, Frederikke Hammershøi (1838–1914) and his sister, Anna. They maintained a very close relationship throughout their lives also after Hammershøi was married. Not much is known about Hammershøi's father and older brother, Otto, and they do not belong to this inner circle. Ida and Vilhelm had no children, Anna and Svend never married, but continued to live together after their mother's death, and they thus all remained each other's immediate family.

In Alfred Bramsen's catalogue raisonné of Hammershøi's works, the present portrait is dated 1883, but at the same time described as a portrait of the 15-year-old Anna Hammershøi – something does not add up here, as Anna was born in 1866 and thus had to be at least 16 years old, if the dating is correct. In any case, this is a youthful work by Hammershøi and the earliest known portrait of the sister.

In the portrait, we get very close to Anna's face, but she does not look at us. Her gaze is turned inward, as if she is engrossed in her own thoughts in her very own room, and she is not paying attention to us. The background, the dark hair and the massive black dress are in contrast to the sensitive, soft lighting and the refined, blurred treatment of the face with the slightly rose-coloured cheeks, the characteristically beautiful narrow mouth and the slightly offset, not quite uniformly coloured eyes. It is a loosely sketched and at the same time sensitively empathetic and sensuous portrait Hammershøi has made of his sister.

The portrait belongs to a series of paintings from around the mid-1880s, in which Anna appears as the model.

This series includes such important early works as Hammershøi's debut work at Charlottenborg in 1885 “Portræt af en ung pige” (Portrait of a Young Girl) (The Hirschsprung Collection Inv. No. 139) and ”En ung pige, der syr” (Young Girl sewing) (Ordrupgaard Inv. No. 46WH) from 1887.

”En ung pige, der syr” was rejected by Charlottenborg's censors, which caused great anger and frustration among many artists at the time. In response to the censorship committee's out-of-date view of art, the artists created, with the French Salon des Refusés as a role model, the artists' association Den Frie (The Free) in 1891, where Hammershøi exhibited annually until his death in 1916.

At the same time as Hammershøi painted and drew his series of portraits of Anna, his good friend and artist colleague Valdemar Schønheyder Møller (1864–1905) took many deeply interesting and beautiful atmospheric photographs of Anna, which one cannot avoid seeing as connected to Hammershøi’s artworks.

Gertrud Oelsner and Annette Rosenvold Hvidt describe this connectedness in “Vilhelm Hammershøi. On the Trail of the Open Picture” (2018): “Both artists work intensely with the close-ups of Anna in the period 1885 to 1888, and if you consider the images as a coherent group, it is like entering the same room. The soft light that falls on Anna's face at an angle from above is a main theme for both Schønheyder Møller and Hammershøi. It is not a spiritual aura that the artists surround the young woman with, but rather an alluring light that nestles around her. The images concentrate in sensuous close-ups on the human figure and suggest that we as viewers dwell on the face, hair, skin, light and paint. The motifs appear as a form of indirect physical touch.” (p. 140)

"By insisting on techniques that enable a disappearance: transparency, blurriness and introversion, the artists paradoxically emphasize the present sensuousness of the images by drawing us up close to the subject. Because the photographs are taken so close to Anna's face, there is not much else in them. It is a choice on the part of the artists: they wanted a focus on the face and figure of Anna – the young woman.” (p. 140)

"It is not a story about Anna's psyche or her fate that is the subject, but a story about how her figure and appearance can be made into a sensual form in the image.” (p. 140).

The present portrait is the first piece in this story, and it is completely understandable that it stayed in Anna's possession until her death in 1955.

In 2018, Bruun Rasmussen sold “Portræt af kunstnerens søster Anna Hammershøi set bagfra” (Portrait of the Artist's Sister Anna Hammershøi Seen from Behind) for DKK 1.5 million.

Category:Paintings