Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi's paintings had a recurring figure: a mysterious woman with her back turned. Here, through letters and photos, her moving, sadness-tinged story is revealed. In his 1901 painting Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor, the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi depicts a tall window, a lopsided white door and a woman at a table.
We can't quite see her face, or what she is doing, but she isn't the painting's protagonist. That role is reserved for the light: the silvery Scandinavian sun that streams through the silent room to cast a pattern on the floor. It's bewitching to see how Hammershøi (1864-1916) took these ordinary things and turned them into modern art.
His paintings, which creak with an unforgettable, otherworldly atmosphere, prefigure the work of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth in mid-century America, and the Minimalism movement of the 1960s. Many paintings feature his home in the old mercantile quarter of Copenhagen. Hammershøi was besotted with its blue-grey walls, old-fashioned wainscoting (panelling), and the way its doors opened on to one light-filled room after another.
So masterfully did he capture these that you imagine you can smell the polish that has made his table gleam, or hear the woman's soft breathing. Her name was Ida Ilsted, and she was Hammershøi's wife – they married in 1891, when he was 27 and she 22. She features in about 100 of his paintings, sitting or standing in her lamp black dress, her thoughts elsewh.