Why the Portrait of a Room Replaced the Portrait of the Person
Vilhelm Hammershøi painted his wife's back more often than her face. In canvas after canvas from early twentieth-century Copenhagen, Ida Hammershøi stands turned away from the viewer in a quiet gray-green room, sometimes alone at a table, sometimes barely present at all, dust motes visible in a shaft of window light across an otherwise empty floor. Hammershøi had every technical ability to paint a face. He chose, repeatedly, not to. The choice raises a real question worth answering seriously: doesn't a face still tell you more about a person than a chair does? Why did 19th-century painters turn away from the face? Formal portraiture had a job for centuries: record status. Pose, clothing, heraldry, and a composed facial expression told a viewer who this person was in a social hierarchy, from Renaissance nobility through eighteenth-century grand-manner portraits. As a prosperous private middle class emerged across nineteenth-century Northern Europe, particularly Denmark, a new su...
