Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916)
Young Beech Forest, Frederiksværk, 1904
Oil on canvas
Vilhelm Hammershøi painted Young Beech Forest, Frederiksværk while summering in Arresødal near Frederiksværk in North Zealand in 1904.
Unlike his open landscapes (7/2016), painted while taking up a position at a more conventional distance from his chosen subject, Hammershøi has here elected to depict a section of the forest in which the most important elements are the slender tree trunks and their fuzzy foliage. The forest floor in the foreground of the picture is blurred and hazy, creating the feeling that one cannot enter the space shown here at all. The beech forest seems alien to us, and even though the subject is firmly inscribed in the Danish Golden Age tradition, it does not testify to National Romantic sensibilities of any kind.
With Young Beech Forest, Frederiksværk, Hammershøi does not follow his usual transversal compositional principle in which his subject matter runs parallel to the picture plane. Instead, he has worked with slightly sloping and dynamic lines: the slender tree trunks and the lush forest floor slope downwards to the left in a diagonal, depicting an – for Hammershøi – unusual point of view. The beech forest is represented without details, without any road and without traces of humans or animals. Everything has been omitted in favour of rendering the light falling in between the trees from behind, the backlight adding a misty, almost dreamlike mood to the scene.
Unlike his open landscapes (7/2016), painted while taking up a position at a more conventional distance from his chosen subject, Hammershøi has here elected to depict a section of the forest in which the most important elements are the slender tree trunks and their fuzzy foliage. The forest floor in the foreground of the picture is blurred and hazy, creating the feeling that one cannot enter the space shown here at all. The beech forest seems alien to us, and even though the subject is firmly inscribed in the Danish Golden Age tradition, it does not testify to National Romantic sensibilities of any kind.
With Young Beech Forest, Frederiksværk, Hammershøi does not follow his usual transversal compositional principle in which his subject matter runs parallel to the picture plane. Instead, he has worked with slightly sloping and dynamic lines: the slender tree trunks and the lush forest floor slope downwards to the left in a diagonal, depicting an – for Hammershøi – unusual point of view. The beech forest is represented without details, without any road and without traces of humans or animals. Everything has been omitted in favour of rendering the light falling in between the trees from behind, the backlight adding a misty, almost dreamlike mood to the scene.