Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916)
Kongevejen at Gentofte. Study, 1892
Oil on canvas

Unlike many other painters, Vilhelm Hammershøi did not seek out distant, remote areas to paint landscapes. Instead, he found his motifs near Copenhagen, in North and West Zealand and on the island of Falster, where his wife Ida Hammershøi (1869–1949) was born and raised.

A substantial portion of Hammershøi’s landscape paintings were created in connection with summer sojourns. In 1892, Ida and Vilhelm Hammershøi spent the summer in Gentofte north of Copenhagen, where he created a series of pictures showing scenes from the Lake Gentofte and Kongevejen. The works share certain traits: the artist depicts an open, cultivated nature in which the country road, flanked by trees, runs across the image surface. Such compositions constituted a new and different way of painting landscape around the turn of the century, at which point most artists still adhered to the tradition of using roads as a compositional device which created a point of entry into the landscape.

Engaging in further experimentation with the visual mode of expression, Hammershøi has arranged his scene so that any differences in level have been evened out in the otherwise slightly hilly landscape, making it appear flat, clear-cut and calm. He has omitted any hint of the fact that at the time, Kongevejen was one of the most important routes leading out from Copenhagen as the landscape is entirely empty of traffic and people.¹