Interior with Young Woman Seen from the Back

Description

Critics writing about Danish painting at the turn of the twentieth century kept returning to this picture for the same reason viewers do today: the woman never turns around. Interior with Young Woman Seen from the Back reproduction collectors and historians alike have treated this withheld face as the whole argument of the painting, a demonstration that a room and a figure could carry feeling without a single glance exchanged with the viewer. The response is not sentimental. It comes directly from what is on the canvas.

About Interior with Young Woman Seen from the Back Reproduction

The room belongs to the apartment on Strandgade in Copenhagen where Hammershøi lived with his wife Ida, who appears here as she does in so many of his interiors, turned away, her body angled slightly to the right as she carries a tray or platter at her hip. There is no event taking place, only the suggestion of one about to happen or just finished, a pause between rooms rather than a scene. The palette stays close to grey, soft blue, and warm neutral tones, with daylight entering from an unseen window and spreading unevenly across the wall and the dark fabric of her dress. Paint is laid thin in the lit passages and built up slightly where shadow gathers along the skirting and the edge of the door frame.

What holds a trained eye is the restraint: a door, a wall, a figure, nothing competing for attention, and the light doing almost all the work of mood. This recurring device, Ida seen from behind in an otherwise empty room, became one of the defining motifs of the later career of Hammershøi, and this canvas is among the clearest statements of it, made at a point when his interiors had grown sparer and more exacting than his earlier work.

The hand-painted reproduction

Bringing that restraint across into a painted copy is a matter of tone rather than drama. The ByMuseum artist responsible for this hand-painted oil painting reproduction works from the same muted grey and blue register, building up the wall and the dress in thin, controlled layers so the diffused daylight reads the same way it does in the original, rather than flattening into a single grey field. The result is a hand-painted replica on artist-grade canvas, with the brushwork left visible rather than smoothed away, so the surface catches light the way an oil surface does and not the way a printed sheet does. A buyer who looks closely at the transition between wall and shadow, or at the slightly built-up paint along the tray in her hands, will find the same passages the original asks for.

• Hand-painted in oil on artist-grade canvas, not printed
• Available in sizes matched to the proportions of the original 60.5 x 50.5 cm composition
• Gallery-ready presentation, finished and ready to hang
• Certificate of authenticity included with every order
• 90 day returns, with a full refund or a free replacement and no restocking fee