Vilhelm Hammershøi: Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25 (1912)

This muted interior scene in which Hammershøi’s use of limited values, omitting extreme darks and lights, depicts a foreground room with a door open to reveal another room beyond. Although the scene is portrayed realistically, softened edges prevent our mistaking it for a photograph. Straight verticals, horizontals, and diagonals dominate the image. In the room closest to the viewer an easel stands near the window on the left with its canvas facing the wall behind it. A seascape, the gold frame of which is the strongest use of color in the painting, hangs on the same wall reinforcing a claim on the viewer’s attention to the left side of the image. What appears to be a card table is visible against the back wall of the farther room, unadorned and empty. The only curvilinear features in the image are found in the clouds of the seascape and incorporated in the architectural details along the ceiling edges.

The walls of both rooms are a pale blue-gray while the doors, woodwork and ceiling are a shadowy white. However, the likelihood that this cool, stark, uninhabited scene would be gloomy is offset by yellow-tinged oblique rectangles representing areas of sunlight cast on the walls and floors in both rooms. Our attention is particularly drawn to these slanting quadrilaterals not only by the contrast of their brighter, warmer colors but also by their juxtaposition to a series of long, narrow verticals that comprise the half-open double doors leading to the farther room and the partial frame of the window through which the sunlight enters the foreground portion of the space. Most importantly, the slanting sunlight draws the viewer’s attention to the easel (one area of light frames the easel, in effect spotlighting it) as does the arrow-like tripod which provides the only other instance of lines at an angle in the room.

But since the canvas which it holds faces away from us, we can only imagine the image portrayed. This may well be the conundrum with which the artist is challenging the viewer to engage by asking is it a finished painting, a work in progress or, perhaps, a blank surface? And where is the artist? Has he or she deserted the canvas for the opportunity to enjoy a day of good weather and escape the lonely existence this room seems to provide?

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