Copenhagen painter Vilhelm Hammershøi had his most productive period between 1898 and 1908 when he lived and worked in an apartment on the top floor of a 17th-century building in the Christianshavn district of his hometown. Here he created the works for which he is now best known – ethereal and enigmatic interior scenes, usually set in this apartment, which helped make him the most expensive Danish artist at auction, with three sales have exceeded $5 million since 2017. The market will be tested again, when a key work from those years goes up for auction at the May 16 Modern Art Night Sale at Sotheby’s New York.
Vilhelm Hammershøi in front of Strandgade 30, with his wife Ida at the window Image: Courtesy of Sotheby’s
Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30, painted in 1907, last changed hands in 1944, when the current owners’ grandparents bought it at a sale in Copenhagen. They also happened to live in the same apartment that Hammershøi lived in when he was in his prime, and they managed to place it on the same wall depicted in the painting, where it has hung ever since.
Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30 is a bare, almost ghostly work showing a trio of musical instruments seemingly set aside, even abandoned, in a room facing the street. The painting has occasionally been loaned to exhibitions, including the groundbreaking 1997–98 traveling exhibition, whose venues included the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Critics and collectors now regard this exhibition as decisive in the emergence of the artist as an artist of international renown.
In May 2022, the highest price for the artist at auction was reached, when another work from the Strandgade 30 period entered Christie’s New York sale from the collection of Texas philanthropist Anne Bass. Stue (interior with an oval mirror) sold for $6.3 million, after a pre-sale estimate of $1.5–2.5 million. Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30which will be presented in preview in the Sotheby’s showroom in London from April 12 to 16, will be estimated between 3 and 5 million dollars, the highest ever for a Danish work.
The painting has long been on Sotheby’s radar, says Claude Piening, senior international specialist in European art at Sotheby’s London. “We’ve known the painting for many years,” he says, referring to relationships with two generations of owners of the work. And the apartment itself is a legendary location for local Hammershøi experts, says Gertrud Oelsner, director of Copenhagen’s Hirschsprung Collection, known for its Hammershøi holdings, who considers herself one of the few who have managed to visit. .
Strandgade 30 dates back to the 1630s, and the artist “needed the old building”, says Oelsner, to inspire him. Unlike most local artists of the time, she says, Hammershøi did without a studio, opting to paint from home, the secular atmosphere contributing both to the subject matter and the good working environment. When Strandgade 30 underwent renovation he and his wife, who were tenants, were forced to move and the artist died in 1916, aged just 51.
The equivocal, even odd, aspects of Hammershøi’s art indicate a modern sensibility, but scholars tend to place it firmly in a 19th-century tradition, regardless of the 20th-century dates of many of its iconic interiors.
In 2018, the Getty paid $5 million for Hammershøi Interior with an easel, Bredgade 25, representing his penultimate home, this time in central Copenhagen. The museum is on a mission to collect works up to 1900, but “we pushed that limit a bit” for the work, says Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at Getty.
Sotheby’s says it has alerted a small group of potential buyers to Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30 ahead of today’s sale announcement. (“Some people need time to settle their finances,” says a Sotheby’s spokesperson). “For us we have one and I think one is probably enough – it will be that’s why I wrote to you.”
