Provenance
With Richard Green Fine Paintings, London, no. RH 1176.

Carl Vilhelm Holsøe, a talented Danish painter of interiors, was born in western Denmark and began his formal training in Copenhagen in 1882. It was during this time that he became acquainted with Vilhelm Hammershøi, a contemporary fellow artist and countryman. Their life-long friendship and association is evident in their influence on each other's work. Holsøe painted landscapes and still lives, but became best known for his realistic interior scenes, mainly of his own household; quite often using his wife, Emile Heise, as the sitter.

Holsøe developed a genre of painting faithful to the tranquillity and quiet beauty of the domestic home. The minimally furnished interior compositions often include a figure which is typically turned away from the viewer, with strategically placed objects that reflect Danish modernism of the time. These interior compositions evoked the sensibility of the Dutch masters of the 17th century which reveal a strong structural sense, precise vision and first-hand observation of the room and the light.

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- 19th Century & Orientalist Paintings