Per Kirkeby once said that whenever Vilhelm Hammershøi was short of cash, he painted some of those women seen from behind. They were easy to sell and gradually became his trademark. The models were his wife, Ida, or his sister, Anna.

Hammershøi, of course, had enemies as well as admirers. What he painted was simply not comme il faut, and the enemies were in the majority. Like all good art, it did not fit its own age. His flat on Strandgade in Copenhagen was a constant source of inspiration, and he depicted its interior time and time again. An unusual departure from his typical subject matter is Five Portraits, painted fifteen years before his death. It depicts five artists, with J. F. Willumsen as the most striking of them all; he looks straight out at us. The table around which the five artists are seated is unmistakably coffin-shaped and, to me, a symbol of death’s perpetual presence. Hammershøi himself died young, at the age of fifty-one, without recognition. Much later, when people began to see his pictures as photographic and as manifestations of a Nordic noir sensibility, he became immensely popular.

Many of his landscape paintings show scenes from the area around my childhood home: Gentofte Lake, the Eremitage, and Kongevejen (The house Skovlyst, where Strindberg spent a summer during the same period, was located there as well).