‘[Vilhelm Hammershøi] wanted to paint ships - not ships under sail as Eckersberg had done, but ships at the quay. Ships whose masts and rigging described fine drawings in the air and whose lines, set against the schematic architecture of the surrounding buildings, merged to create a complex silhouette.’
Painted in 1908, this view was to be found just a few hundred metres from Hammershøi’s home at Strandgade 30. The street was the central spine of the mercantile Christianshavn quarter, named after King Christian IV, during whose reign it was founded in accordance with the King’s wishes as a settlement for well-to-do merchants. Even today Strandgade is framed by historic office buildings erected by the trading companies as town houses and mansions built for their owners. At the northern end of Christianshavn was the Greenland Trade Wharf, one of several surrounded by warehouses.
Christianshavn's rich seventeenth century associations were precisely what had drawn Hammershøi to the area. It would have been a bustling, industrious district, yet like his interiors, Hammershøi’s outdoor views of the quarter – whether of the old warehouses, his repeated views of the Asiatic Company buildings facing his apartment, or of the Christianskirke – are imbued with haunting mystery, evoking a mood rather than a moment. The ships and quayside are devoid of human presence, beneath misty leaden skies.
Compositionally and in atmosphere the painting clearly takes inspiration from earlier art. Specifically it harks back to the Dutch Golden Age marine painters, and perhaps notably to Vermeer, an artist Hammershøi particularly admired and studied, and with whose View of Delft (Mauritshuis Museum, The Hague) he was no doubt familiar. The view also takes on the spiritual connotations of the German Romantic landscapes painted a hundred years earlier. As in the silent marines and landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the cross-shaped masts of the moored ships reaching for the skies connote a bridge between earth and heaven.
And yet, Greenland Trade Wharf is also uncompromisingly modern in its conception, a 'symphony' in subtle tonal ranges of grey and pink, akin to the haunting watery nocturnes of Hammershøi’s contemporary James McNeill Whistler whose work he so admired but to his great regret an artist he never met. And though devoid of human presence, the artist introduces other energies and synergies, for instance the sense of a correspondence between the two tall-masted ships moored abreast of each other, as if recounting their tales of voyages made - a device of communication between inanimate objects that may have proved an inspiration to Edward Hopper.
