Self-Portrait. The Cottage Spurveskjul at Sorgenfri, North of Copenhagen

About this work

We see Hammershøi holding a brush, engaged in the act of painting - presumably he is painting this picture of himself. We see a convincing image of a person in a room. But we see something else too. One of the characteristic features of Hammershøi's works is their flat, plane-like appearance - they have a certain flatness to them no matter how convincingly perspective is used to convey spatial depth. The plane itself is accentuated in many ways, e.g. by making the colours visible as materials. You can see the colour in Hammershøi's paintings. They balance somewhere between being surface and space, between being objects and illusion. In the self-portrait the emphasis of the painting as an object becomes particularly strong because Hammershøi has depicted himself painting on the physical painting we are looking at - not on an image of a canvas in the painting. By so doing he highlights the dual nature of the painting: we appear to be watching a reliable portrait of Hammershøi, but we are also watching paint on a canvas.