Ida in an Interior with Piano, painted in 1901 in the artist’s apartment at Strandgade 30, is a masterful evocation of space and light. It depicts the artist’s wife seated at the window of the drawing room of the flat, which they occupied from 1898 until 1909. Unlike surviving photographs of Hammershøi and Ida in the drawing room at Strandgade, the paintings of their home reveal very little about the couple’s domestic existence. Devoid of sentiment and narrative, they are formal compositions in tone, light, and silence. The piano, normally associated with room-filling sound, stands silent in the stillness, the player’s stool empty. Ida appears absorbed in her handiwork, yet exactly what she is doing, sewing or darning, is concealed by the side table. Instead, the painting is, to use a term coined by Hammershøi’s contemporary, the painter James McNeill Whistler, a ‘symphony’ in white and grey, the whole illuminated by the soft directional light from the window as in the paintings of Vermeer which Hammershøi so admired. Hammershøi painted this corner of the drawing room in several well-known paintings, always re-arranging the furniture and paintings to arrive at new and interesting compositions.
[Sold for £1,142,500 at Sotheby’s, London - Oil on canvas, 60 x 55 cm]