Vilhelm Hammershøi

Acquired by the father of the present owner circa 1970; thence by descent

Aarhus, Kunstmuseum, Intim/Sublim: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Hein Heinsen, Erik A. Frandsen, 2001
Hamburg, Kunsthalle, Vilhelm Hammershøi, 2003
Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst; Munich Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung; Hammershøi and Europe: A Danish Artist around 1900, 2012, no. 115, illustrated in the catalogue

Poul Vad, Hammershøi: Værk og liv, Copenhagen, 1988, p. 455, listed; p. 463, illustrated (as Sol over havet)

The canvas has not been lined. Ultraviolet light reveals a handful of very minor, tiny pinhead-sized spots of retouching in the upper-right quadrant, apart from which this painting is in very good original condition. Presented in a simple silver-gilt frame, with a nameplate. The colours are fresher and more open in reality than in the catalogue illustration, with much less yellow overall and subtler tones of blue.
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Dated by Poul Vad to circa 1902, Sun over the Sea is rare, if not unique, in Hammershøi’s oeuvre on two counts: not only is it his only known marine (in other works the sea is hinted at in the form of masts visible behind high walls (lot 3) or of ships moored in harbour basins); it is the only known work in which Hammershøi paints directly into the sun (in his landscapes backlit by the sun, its disc is obscured and diffused by the branches and crowns of trees). It is as if, in a moment of epiphany, the closure and introversion that characterises so much of his painted work is suddenly cast aside to reveal a vast and sublime vista.

The picture leaves much open to interpretation, but both compositionally and in feel it takes on the spiritual connotations of the German Romantic landscapes painted a hundred years earlier. As in the marines and landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich (fig. 1), the sun may denote hope, the cross-shaped masts of the moored ships reaching for the skies a bridge between earth and heaven. Hammershøi often sought inspiration from the past, most notably from Vermeer in his interiors, and the work of the German Romantics and Danish Golden painters had a deep resonance throughout northern Germany and Scandinavia. And yet, with the uncompromisingly cropped ships and its horizontal tonal layers, Sun over the Sea is at the same time extremely modern in its conception, an aesthetic with no narrative, akin to the watery nocturnes of Hammershøi’s contemporary James McNeill Whistler whose work he so admired but to his great regret an artist he never met.