By Robert Rubsam
There she is, with her back to us: by the window, at the table, playing the piano, hiding something in her hands. The room around her is bare, shadowed: there is no more than an oval mirror on the walls, a sideboard, an empty table; even the picture frames are empty. The woman is another fixture, an adornment, pale and gleaming in the cold wintry light. You linger like a ghost — able to watch but never reach her.
Her name was Ida, and she was the wife of painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. She lived a perfectly bourgeois life with her husband in a series of well-appointed apartments on Copenhagen’s Strandgade. In photos, their homes are full of books, paintings, ceramics, flowers. They seem lived-in, the product of careful arrangement and long habitation. Yet in his paintings, the rooms become vacant. Surely there must have been talk, fragrance, music — why else would they have a piano? — but on the canvas you see little more than a sunbeam as it crosses the floor.
Hammershøi took the insights of the Dutch Golden Age masters, who knew that windows exist not to see the outer world but to shed light on the inner one, and extended them, creating an entire world in the space of his apartment. He cleared away and rearranged furnishings, finding worthy subjects in stoves, floorboards, tablecloths. No painter has ever lavished such attention on a doorknob. Even Vermeer filled his interiors with little romantic dramas, gesturing beyond the bounds of the house. With Hammershøi, the interior, utterly private, is the point.
My own home is not nearly so composed. I live in a semi-basement, damp in winter, sticky in summer. My furniture is fiberboard, pressed to the walls to free up a little room. Surely life at Strandgade 30 must have been quiet and cold, but it was theirs all the same. Alone together in their apartment, they had the power to arrange, to rearrange, to set up an easel, to turn away.
The effect is simultaneously distant and intimate. However lonely his interiors can feel, they are the product of real familiarity with the places of his life. You sense him waiting patiently for dusk, watching as the light declines, only rising from his couch to paint when the room appears just so. Their home, their marriage, their life: all can be mapped, explored, arranged and rearranged, so long as one has the space in which to place them.
I came across Ida years ago, in Tokyo, at the National Museum of Western Art. She sits past a set of double doors, at the far wall, playing a piano, her dress blue and her hair drawn up. A pair of dark wooden tables clutters the foreground. The painting was one of many. I did not buy a postcard or make a note in my journal. I moved on to other cities, other paintings.
Yet over the following months, I found myself searching for Ida online. That sense of silence, that privacy, that great probing unseen intimacy: she spoke to me at a time in my life when I carried my world on my back, little more than a computer and several pounds of clothing in a large bag, and had little else to hold me in place. Hammeshøi’s paintings of Ida gestured towards a privacy so immense it could fill a building, an interior that could extend outward from the self to make a place for itself in the world.
Photography: Peter Nahum/The Leicester Galleries, London; Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images