Two Figures (The Artist and His Wife)
By Brynn Gordon
Compared to the flash of Christmas markets and holiday shopping, it is easy to overlook the natural rhythm of the winter season as a time, at least in St Andrews, of limited daylight and transition into the new year, the world itself going into hibernation.
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Two Figures (The Artist and His Wife), or Double Portrait, 1898 Oil on canvas, 72 × 86 cm, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum
The effect of this introspection is captured in Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi’s (1864-1916)’s Two Figures (The Artist and His Wife), or Double Portrait (1898). Encouraged from a young age by his mother, Hammershøi attended the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen at a time when the artistic mainstream in Europe tended towards Beaux-Arts Naturalism or the technicolour fever of the Nabis and Symbolists. His minimalistic and associative artistic sensibilities were described by his tutor Peder Severin Krøyer as ‘butter or lard in moonlight.’.
In 1891, Hammershøi married Ida Istle, who became his muse and constant companion, completing a double portrait of them started after Christmas of 1897, inspired by the artist’s observation of James Abbot McNeil Whistler’s work on a recent trip to London.
“The one picture I am painting away at, and which I have worked on since we came back here after Christmas, is a kind of double portrait of Ida and myself, although my back is almost completely turned to the viewer, and, actually, they are not intended to be portraits in the strictest sense. I am fairly satisfied with it.” - 1898
On one hand, Two Figures presents a modernist framing of the couple—Hammershøi's dark coat and hair presenting a visual void in the foreground to highlight the soft winter light falling on Ida’s face, clothes, and wedding ring. The viewer observes him over his shoulder observing her, peeking into their intimate relationship and the central role Ida played within his artistic practice. On the other hand, Ida’s soft, delicately rendered features, particularly her plain clothes, soft brown hair, and sleepy, inward-looking expression, recall the classical pictorial conventions of the Last Supper, emphasised by the chiaroscuro lighting comparable to Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1601).
Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, 1601, Oil on Canvas, 141x196.2cm, National Gallery
This post-Christmas vision of Ida and himself may defy their function as portraits “in the strictest sense” due to its depiction of Ida as a Christ-like figure, making it a Tronie, or a depiction of a character rather than the sitter. The genre was popular amongst Dutch Golden Age painters, Hammershøi himself often stating that “I will learn more from the old art than from the new.”
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Untitled, Pencil on paper, (c. 1890s)
Hammershøi’s alternatively intimate visions of himself and Ida’s closeness, and of his imaging of her divinity, speak to the capacity of the thin winter light to facilitate a kind of introspective, fanciful daydream when surrounded by loved ones. The deep, restful, midwinter spirit in which Hammershøi conceived this work reminds viewers to look closely at their surroundings during this season, as the thin, winter light may grant one new understanding and appreciation for the familiar.
Bibliography
Bonett, Helena. An Introduction to the Exhibition for Teachers and Students: VILHELM HAMMERSHØI, the Poetry of Silence. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2008. https://rodicdavidson.co.uk/app/uploads/2018/08/hammershoi-education-guide-300.pdf.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Vilhelm Hammershøi | Moonlight, Strandgade 30,” n.d. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/441933.