SANTA BARBARA, CA.- The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA)announced the acquisition of one of the most significant 19th-century paintings in its history. Acquired from Agnews, London, the painting is the first interior created by Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) that is entirely devoid of people—a poetic vehicle for his nuanced psychological portraits of the experience of domestic spaces that still resonate today. Dubbed “the Danish Painter of Solitude and Light” by the breakthrough 1998 retrospective organized by the always prescient art historian Robert Rosenblum, the artist’s hauntingly melancholic, nearly monochromatic interiors have caused some to dub him “the Danish Vermeer.”

The painting was acquired in honor of the tenure of recently retired Director, Larry Feinberg. In response to news of this acquisition, Feinberg commented: “I am absolutely delighted that the Museum has acquired this beautiful and very important painting in my honor. I have long studied and admired the works of 19th-century Symbolist artists, and Hammershøi is the greatest of the Danish Symbolists. This is among the most significant acquisitions of 19th-century art that the Museum has made in decades.”

While the artist’s enigmatic depictions of solitary figures in anonymous empty rooms have been compared to the work of the American 20th-century figure painter, Edward Hopper, Hammershøi’s art was very much of its generation. He is typically thought of as a participant in international Symbolism, though he himself never identified with any specific school or movement. Symbolism was a European art movement that emerged between the two world wars, characterized by a fascination with interior psychological states and the dark side of humanity. Hammershøi’s early penchant for allegorical compositions that feel heavy with nostalgia for a pre-modern age have much in common with those of the French Symbolist, Puvis de Chavannes, for example, or the Swiss Symbolist, Ferdinand Hodler. But it was for his domestic interiors that Hammershøi earned the most critical accolades. This painting is the very first such interior that he did, completely devoid of people. Its striking modernity belies its early date of 1888. As the artist put it: “I have always thought there was such beauty about a room like that, even though there are no people in it, perhaps precisely because there are no people in it …”

The silence associated with Vermeer’s serene interiors becomes even more pervasive in Hammershøi’s early 20th-century renditions, which reverberate with unstated longing for a tranquility, then quickly vanishing in an industrial age. Like Edouard Vuillard, the French “intimiste,” Hammershøi took inspiration from the domestic environment around him. He used his mother, brother, and, most frequently, his wife Ida as models (and increasingly, photographs of them staged by him), though their relationship to him is not an essential aspect of the paintings’ significance. Rather, they are universal stand-ins for embodied existence, in which vision provides material access, but is psychologically repelled by the figures’ obliviousness to us.

In this painting, the subject remains ambiguous. The period rooms are emptied of the trace of everyday living, save for an imposing, old-fashioned jamb stove, of a kind made popular starting in the 18th century. Its abandonment underscores the absence of the sound of social interaction that the stove attracted in Victorian parlors, and the open door at center leads to another door, this time closed, as if to frustrate our desire to enter the space. The substance of the paint, applied with slow drags of the brush, somehow materializes space as defined by the sunlight streaming into the hallway and through the open door through an unseen window. Its complex, painterly surface, like so many great paintings of the recent past, eludes digital reproduction. As the poet and great admirer of Hammershøi, Rainer Maria Rilke once observed, “Hammershøi is not one of those about whom one must speak quickly. His work is long and slow, and at whichever moment one apprehends it, it will offer plentiful reasons to speak of what is important and essential in art.”