Entertainment
Ida Hammershøi: The identity of art’s most famous ‘faceless woman
Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi’s paintings had a recurring figure: a mysterious woman with her back turned. Here, through letters and photos, her moving, sadness-tinged story is revealed.
In his 1901 painting Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor, the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi depicts a tall window, a lopsided white door and a woman at a table. We can’t quite see her face, or what she is doing, but she isn’t the painting’s protagonist. That role is reserved for the light: the silvery Scandinavian sun that streams through the silent room to cast a pattern on the floor.