Vilhelm Hammershøi – White Doors
An interior by Vilhelm Hammershøi, long revered as one of Denmark’s most celebrated artists, comes up at Sotheby’s sale of 19th century European paintings in London on June 6. Painted in 1899, White Doors perfectly reflects the interests and sensibilities of its distinguished owners, aesthetes from three generations of the same family. The work comes to sale from the estate of Jens Risom, the renowned Danish American furniture designer, best known for his mass-produced ‘Risom Chair’. Mr. Risom died last December at the age of 100. The painting , which has never been on the market since it was painted, is estimated at £400,000-600,000.
Hammershøi took the domestic interior as his principal subject, using his Copenhagen apartment as the setting for some of his most recognisable compositions. The sparsely furnished interconnecting rooms, dove-grey walls and solid white-painted doors provided the artist with the ideal environment in which he could immerse himself in a self-contained and hermetically sealed world. The natural daylight of the Danish mid-winter illuminates this sequence of spaces, and in White Doors its muted radiance is transformed into a poetic symphony of tone and light.