SOTHEBY’S SCANDINAVIAN SALE on Tuesday, 22 November 2011 will be headlined by Interior with Ida in a White Chair by Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916). Estimated at £500,000-700,000, the painting is one of the most important works by the artist ever to be offered at auction and comes to the market from a Private Danish Collection. Painted in 1900 in the artist’s home at Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen, it depicts his wife Ida. A sublime distillation of Hammershøi’s artistic concerns during his lifetime, the painting epitomises his remarkable ability to capture a sense of timelessness and introspective solitude.
Interior with Ida in a White Chair can be considered the most poetic of the series of paintings made from this viewpoint in the apartment. The viewer’s eye is gently led from the graceful curve of Ida’s back and the finely carved fan-shaped back of the white chair in which she sits, absorbed in her activity, to the central hallway and through to the light-filled room in this distance, with its expanse of window. The rarefied light is the principal subject here, in all its nuanced richness.
Commenting on the picture, Claude Piening, Senior Director in Sotheby’s European Paintings Department, said: “This painting ranks among Hammershøi’s finest of Strandgade 30. It is of particular interest because it is among the first of the interiors of the apartment that would feature so centrally in the artist’s oeuvre. Vilhelm and his wife Ida moved to the address in 1898 and would spend ten happy years there. This painting was completed two years after their arrival.”
Sotheby’s holds the record for a work by Hammershøi sold at auction: Interieur med staffeli, Bredgade 25 (Interior with easel, Bredgade 25), painted circa 1910, sold for £590,400 on 13 June 2006.
Image: Interior with Ida in a White Chair by Vilhelm Hammershøi, Estimate: £500,000-700,000*
*Pre-sale estimates do not include buyer’s premium
