Vilhelm Hammershøi, 'Interior', 1899

A woman stands with her back to us, absorbed in something we cannot see. If it were a contemporary painting, we could be certain she was looking at her phone. In 1899, when this painting was made, she must surely be reading something, a letter, perhaps. Her status is unclear. The thin white ribbon around her waist and the line of fabric down the side of her black dress suggest she may be a maid wearing an apron.

That contrast between light and dark plays out across the whole painting: the woman’s white neck and her dark hair and dress, or the brown table and chairs and the white doors. There is no bright colour here, no suggestion of movement or sound, just a quiet stillness. Hammershøi made the background of the painting feel almost as significant as the foreground. The eye is led relentlessly towards the corner of the room, where the woman is facing. The vertical line separating the walls forms a sort of hinge in the composition, but we could also see it as the edge of a mirror. The two walls, with their two identical doors, seem to reflect each other. Yet one wall is mostly in shade, the other bathed in pale winter sunlight emanating from an unseen window. The mirroring effect is also subtly played out in the shape of the round table with its polished surface, which is echoed by the metallic sheen and the cylindrical form of the stove and chimney. 

Hammershøi specialised in paintings such as this, depicting bare, quiet rooms. They may be empty or include the same lone figure in a black dress. His wife, Ida Ilsted, was the model, and she is often shown reading a book or a letter. This particular room was in a seventeenth-century merchant house in Copenhagen, into which the artist moved in December 1898. He portrayed rooms in this house in more than 60 of his paintings, adjusting the real objects to fit the composition. Looking closely at the canvas, we can see that he has reduced the size of the table, which originally filled most of the foreground, and that the figure of Ida was added at the end.

In these quiet, sunlit rooms, there are clear echoes of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, especially the interiors painted by Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer, in particular, often included empty chairs as props and young women in a reflective mood, reading a letter or playing a musical instrument. But, with his limited palette and the loneliness of his figures, Hammershøi stripped the old Dutch masters’ compositions down to their most essential designs. 

The concert pianist Leonard Borwick saw this painting reproduced on a Christmas card when he was visiting Copenhagen in 1903. He liked it so much that he bought it from Hammershøi, and they quickly became friends.