Art Dispatch Featured Hammershøi Painting Rovigo

Grayness illuminated

August 19, 2025

Rovigo sits unfavorably between Padua and Ferrara. Unfavorably, because Padua and Ferrara, despite bombing in World War II, are wonderful medieval cities replete with Renaissance riches. Rovigo is a sleepy place with little going for it by comparison, many of its younger people having deserted its relative economic decline to venture into more financially rewarding parts of the Veneto. The town center on the day I visited was almost deserted, its quietude perhaps being its most suitable attribute for an exhibition dedicated to “Hammershøi and the Painters of Silence in North Europe and Italy.”¹

The show was the only international retrospective of Hammershøi this year, and the first such in Italy, both of which marked it out as a special event. The anticipation in advance, however, was matched only by the deflation on attendance. For a number of reasons, the experience was a surprisingly flat one, not an occasion for inspired peace and revealing inner reflection as one had hoped.

The Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) is rightly renowned for his studies of enigmatic calmness, a calmness that seemingly has the potential to achieve ataraxis for the viewer, who is frequently and deliberately denied this by uneasy undercurrents. The stillness of Vermeer is not necessarily the stillness of Hammershøi. (It has been said that Hammershøi is the bridge between Vermeer and Hopper.) The canvases are awash with austere gray; while not as monochromatic as, say, works by Spilliaert, they largely omit the reassurance of warmer colors. Hammershøi is a master of gray gradations, so it is too trite, but also too irresistible, for modern commentators to refer to his “fifty shades of gray.” As Hammershøi himself opined: “I am absolutely convinced that paintings come out best, in terms of color, when less color is used.”

His famous room scenes are elegantly spare, Hammershøi purposely stripping away the bourgeois clutter that would messily fill a painted Victorian domestic scene, such as William Holman Hunt’s busy and heavily symbolic The Awakening Conscience (1853). In contrast, Hammershøi is successfully subtle. The art historian Kasper Monrad referred to the “intense absence” in Hammershøi’s work, a perceptive description. Sunlight in the Room III (1903) manages to combine minimalism with elegance, with the window frame reflected on the wall lightening the feel of the piece; Interior with Sofa (1907) has a similar effect. Interior, Strangade 30 (1907) is darker and altogether more austere. It is interesting to have on display an earlier piece, The White Door (1888), a much more impressionistic work compared to his more familiar and sharper later paintings. It might be argued that Hammershøi’s interiors captured Rilke’s understanding of the significance of a room:

For if we think of the existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of the floor on which they walk up and down. Thus, they have a certain security.

Hammershøi seems to paint like this: section by section, or in groups of limited sections receding into the background.

Where people inhabit his paintings, they tend to be at a distance or portrayed in the Rückenfigur manner; while not original by any means, these motifs fit perfectly and evocatively into his interiors, as in Rest (1905), a centerpiece of the Rovigo exhibition, its velvety grays and browns adding to the exposed nape of a neck to create a sensuous feel in an otherwise minimalist environment. Such combinations contribute to the viewer’s sense of unease. Less problematic—or seemingly so—is another domestic scene, Interior, Strandgade 30 (this one from 1902): a narrow vista of three rooms with open, linking doors leading us to the back of the painting. In the middle room, a maid is sweeping, maintaining the pristine conditions of Hammershøi’s home and the paintings inside. (Dusting must have been a snap in his home, as there were barely any ornaments or objects that required moving.)

More unsettling again is Double Portrait of the Artist and His Wife, through a Mirror (1911). Hammershøi is looking at the viewer with a three-quarter turn, while his wife (Ida, the model in some one hundred of his paintings) is—surprise, surprise!—shown with her back to us. The scene looks awkward enough—there are possible suggestions, perhaps deliberately misleading, of argumentative unhappiness and alienation here—and the addition of the mirror’s perspectives serves to intensify matters further still.

Despite some excellent Hammershøi pieces as above, why did the show fail to rise above a slight feeling of hebetude? For a start, there were not many Hammershøis on display: only fourteen of some eighty works in total. The padding out of the exhibition with some clearly inferior works diluted it considerably. These came mainly as Italian emulators of Hammershøi, such as Oscar Ghiglia in Isa’s Back, at the Pianoforte (1917–18) and the pedestrian Signora Ojetti at the Pianoforte (1910). Others were better; indeed, a number were of high quality—Émile-René Ménard’s Dusk on the Canal (1894) and Henri Duhem’s Place Saint-Amé (ca. 1900–10) stand out—but, despite their empathic sentiments, they failed to add up to a full-fledged Hammershøi exhibition. Amid all the somber representations of silence was an odd but welcome inclusion: Le Sidaner’s lovely Red Tablecloth (1931), offering a detonation of incongruously noisy, Bonnardian-style color.

The hypocrisy of this reviewer was revealed by a coincident school trip to the exhibition. While one is all for such educational visits, is a Hammershøi exhibition the place for large groups of children under ten years old? The children behaved impeccably, but the teacher leading them was delivering relentless verbal lessons in front of numerous paintings—not something conducive to a show dedicated to “paintings of silence.”

Finally, the show, curated by Paulo Bolpagni, suffered from the limitations of the palazzo and its subdued lighting. It is one thing to emphasize Hammershøi’s grayness, quite another to render the whole experience as a sepulchral one. Even the choice of Hammershøi’s paintings added to this. Where were his windows? Some more fenestral illumination would have dispelled the crepuscular atmosphere. For Hammershøi was as much a painter of light as of silence, and the light he paints often captures that very silence even more captivatingly. Too much of the silence here was a little claustrophobic.