Vilhelm Hammershøi

Vilhelm Hammershøi painted almost nothing but quiet: grey rooms, closed white doors, a woman seen from behind, a patch of light lying on a bare floor. For more than ten years his subject was one flat, at Strandgade 30 in the old Christianshavn quarter of Copenhagen, which he shared with his wife Ida.He kept to a narrow range of greys, whites and soft browns and left out most of what a room usually holds. When a person appears it is usually Ida, turned away from us, reading or standing at a table. He is often compared with Vermeer, whose interiors he knew, but his rooms are emptier and stiller, closer to a held breath than a story.Hammershøi was well known across Europe in his lifetime, faded from view after his death in 1916 and was rediscovered in the 1990s, when large exhibitions in Paris and New York brought him back.