Strandgade, Sunshine (c. 1906): Art, History and Details

Strandgade, Sunshine (c. 1906) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Vilhelm Hammershøi (Danish, 1864–1916).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

One of Denmark’s most celebrated artists, Vilhelm Hammershøi was a painter of quiet spaces, mystery, and silence. Among his most memorable works are paintings of his apartment at 30 Strandgade in Copenhagen, here seen with the sun shining through a window, illuminating the floor and door to the right, while a woman stands in the shadows. The nearly empty room, muted tones, and closed door next to a window evoke a haunting mood filled with psychological complexity.

Object facts

• Title: Strandgade, Sunshine
• Date: c. 1906
• Creator attribution: Vilhelm Hammershøi (Danish, 1864–1916)
• Culture: Denmark
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Unframed: 50.5 x 56.2 cm (19 7/8 x 22 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2023.38

A detail from the museum

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "Hammershøi is not one of those artists that one needs to talk about quickly. His work is long and slow and at whatever moment one comes to grips with it, one will have ample occasion to speak of what is significant and essential in art."

Collection credit

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift

Further reading listed by the museum

• Robinson, William H. "Modern European Painting." In The Keithley Collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art, edited by Heather Lemonedes Brown, 132-139, 142-149. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2022.
• Hammershøi, Vilhelm. Fortegnelse over arbejder af Vilhelm Hammershøi. København: Kunstforeningen, 1916.
• Michaelis, Sophus, and Alfred Bramsen. Vilhelm Hammershøi : kunstneren og hans værk. København. Denmark: Kristiania : Gyldendalske Boghandeln Nordisk Forlag, 1918.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.