Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior of Courtyard, Strandgade 30
"In December 1898 Hammershøi moved into a seventeenth-century merchant
house at Strandgade 30, Copenhagen. For the decade that he resided there
in a second-floor apartment he painted more than sixty canvases
depicting the rooms of the dwelling, often including his wife, Ida.
Influenced by Dutch seventeenth-century painting, particularly the quiet
interiors of Jan Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, Hammershøi's meditations
on the interior spaces of his apartment are psychologically enigmatic.
Here he renders the building's interior courtyard, with strong
illumination focused on an open window. Three doorways at lower right,
each obscured, lead, respectively, to the street, to a staircase, and to
the cellar. The eccentric and irregular geometries created by walls and
windows, overhangs and thresholds, in conjunction with the essentially
monochromatic gray palette punctuated by restrained mauve, endow the
composition with a distinctly disturbing quality. The opened window and
doorways suggest human presence, but the overall effect is one of
profound absence."
more
here
.