LONDON, 21 March 2017 – This June, Sotheby’s will offer at auction a quintessential interior by Vilhelm Hammershøi, long revered as one of Denmark’s most celebrated artists. Painted in 1899, White Doors perfectly reflects the interests and sensibilities of its distinguished owners, aesthetes from three generations of the same family. The work comes to sale from the estate of Jens Risom, the renowned Danish American furniture designer, best known for his mass-produced ‘Risom Chair’. Estimated at £400,000-600,000, the painting will be offered in Sotheby’s sale of 19th Century European Paintings in London on 6 June 2017.

Claude Piening, Head of Department, 19th Century European Paintings, commented: ‘White Doors is a jewel-like interior, and quintessential Hammershøi in every respect. It is tremendously exciting to be handling this work which has been handed down through three generations of the same family, never been on the market since it was painted, and not seen by the public for over thirty years.’

Nina Wedell-Wedellsborg, Head of Sotheby’s Denmark, noted: ‘Jens Risom’s designs are one of Denmark’s great cultural and commercial exports to the world, and it is wonderful to think that Hammershøi’s painting, among his cherished possessions to follow him to America in the 1950s, might have served as an inspiration to his work.’

Hammershøi took the domestic interior as his principal subject, using his Copenhagen apartment as the setting for some of his most recognisable compositions. The sparsely furnished interconnecting rooms, dove-grey walls and solid white-painted doors provided the artist with the ideal environment in which he could immerse himself in a self-contained and hermetically sealed world. The natural daylight of the Danish mid-winter illuminates this sequence of spaces, and in White Doors its muted radiance is transformed into a poetic symphony of tone and light.

Hammershøi was a key influence on director Tom Hooper and production designer Eve Stuart when making The Danish Girl, the film about the lives of Danish artists Einar and Gerda Wegener. The lighting, setting – the blue-grey interior of the couple’s apartment in 1920s Copenhagen – and cinematography were all modelled on the pared-down aesthetic of the artist’s paintings.

Around 1900, White Doors was acquired from Hammershøi by Axel Otto Henriques, a friend of the artist and art critic and satirical playwright. The painting was inherited by Henriques’ daughter Inger who, in 1915, married the architect Sven Risom, and subsequently it passed down to Sven and Inger’s son Jens, who passed away in December 2016 at the age of 100.