Is Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Art Public Domain? Rooms, Light and Image Sources

Short answer: The two Hammershøi paintings illustrated here have openly designated museum files: Moonlight, Strandgade 30 from the Met under CC0, and Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor from SMK under the Public Domain Mark. His ordinary EU and UK author term has elapsed. This guide does not independently establish the paintings’ U.S. publication histories or clear every Hammershøi reproduction.

With this artist, identifying the picture can be half the work. Search for “Hammershøi interior” and you meet pale doors, empty floors and women facing away. Similar subjects—and translated titles that sound almost interchangeable—can conceal quite different paintings. Start with the room, then confirm its date and museum accession number.

The room is the subject

Vilhelm Hammershøi lived from 1864 to 1916. He made the Copenhagen homes he shared with his wife, Ida, into recurring subjects. SMK’s account of the sunlit interior explains that the apartments served as both home and studio. Strandgade 30 supplied many of the rooms now associated with his work.

These interiors do not require a hidden story to hold your attention. A door can interrupt a wall; a window can turn daylight into a grid; a person can block your view without making eye contact. The paintings ask you to notice the distances between things.

They also reward looking past the idea that grey means colourless. A warm floor, a cooler wall and the almost-white edge of a door may sit very close in tone while remaining distinct. If a reproduction turns everything into flat beige, you lose much of what makes the room convincing.

Moonlight without a figure

The opening image is the Met’s Moonlight, Strandgade 30, accession 2012.203. The museum dates it 1900–1906, not to one certain year. It is an oil painting measuring 41 by 51.1 centimetres: an intimate object rather than a room-sized canvas.

Look first at the window on the left. Its bars reappear as light and shadow on the floor. The closed door on the right offers another rectangle, but one that you cannot see through. Between them, the wall seems spacious precisely because so little occupies it.

The colours are subdued without being neutral. Lavender-grey passages sit beside browner floorboards; white woodwork catches small changes in illumination. The brightest shapes do not form one continuous spotlight. They are interrupted, broken and softened, which makes the air feel different from a brightly photographed rental apartment.

No person tells you how to interpret the room. That absence can feel peaceful, expectant or unsettling, depending on the viewer. It is not evidence that the artist was describing a particular tragedy or diagnosis. The painting gives us a carefully arranged interior; it does not hand over its occupants’ private thoughts.

Keeping the full width matters. A square crop would squeeze the interval between window and door. Those apparently uneventful stretches of floor and wall are part of the subject, not spare space awaiting decoration.

Sunlight and a turned back

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor, 1901. SMK — National Gallery of Denmark, KMS3696. Exact museum record and Public Domain Mark.

Here the windows are softened by light curtains, and there is someone in the room. SMK identifies the seated woman as Ida. Her turned back prevents the picture from becoming a conventional portrait built around a face and expression.

Compare her dark shape with the bright opening beside her. The figure anchors one side of the painting, while the diagonal light reaches into the open floor. A round table interrupts the many straight lines. The few pictures on the wall stay small enough not to become pictures within the picture that demand separate attention.

You can recognise furniture and architecture while remaining unsure what Ida holds or thinks. Leaving that question open is more faithful to the visible evidence than inventing a letter, an argument or a specific emotion. The private activity matters partly because we cannot fully join it.

The painting measures 46.5 by 52 centimetres. Its proportions are close to square, but not square. Compare that shape with the wider Moonlight: the two should not be stretched to fit identical openings in a frame simply because both are called interiors.

Twelve specific paintings

These records extend the view beyond two familiar rooms. Only the two images above are supplied in this guide; the remaining ten are linked research examples, not a package of reviewed downloads. English titles follow the collections’ records, which may change their translations over time.

Painting	Date	Exact record
Moonlight, Strandgade 30	1900–1906	Met 2012.203
Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor	1901	SMK KMS3696
A Room in the Artist’s Home in Strandgade, Copenhagen, with the Artist’s Wife	1902	SMK KMS3697
Evening in the Drawing Room	1904	SMK KMS6658
Interior. Artificial Light	1909	SMK KMS8677
Ida Hammershøi, the Artist’s Wife, with a Teacup	1907	SMK KMS3352
Self-Portrait. The Cottage Spurveskjul at Sorgenfri, North of Copenhagen	1911	SMK KMS3351
Self-Portrait	1890	SMK KMS6692
A Wing of Christiansborg Palace	1907	SMK KMS2052
View of Christiansborg Palace. Late Autumn	1890–1892	SMK KMS6750
From Christianshavn’s Canal, Copenhagen	1905	SMK KMS8415
Near Fortunen, Jægersborg Deer Park, North of Copenhagen	1901	SMK KMS6990

An accession number prevents an important mistake: treating the 1901 and 1902 Strandgade pictures as different names for the same object. It also makes city views and portraits discoverable without forcing everything into the category of an empty room.

What public domain means here

Hammershøi’s ordinary life-plus-70 term has elapsed under the general EU and UK rules. That statement concerns the artist’s ordinary term, not every later contribution, unpublished-material exception or right attached to a new photograph.

In the United States, publication matters. The Copyright Office’s 2026 circular identifies the pre-January 1, 1931 U.S. publication cutoff. “Painted in 1901” is not proof of publication in 1901. The museum designations used here are attributed to the providers; this guide has not independently closed that historical chain for the twelve paintings.

The two file labels also mean different things. CC0 is a dedication or waiver tool; the Public Domain Mark identifies material believed free of known copyright restrictions. SMK’s PDM is not a CC0 licence, and neither label implies that a museum endorses a product made from its image.

Keep the light in the file

Choose an exact museum file rather than copying the first attractive thumbnail. Our Met image and SMK’s official 1600-pixel image derivative retain the complete supplied composition. They have not been brightened, extended or filled with generated detail.

For a print, inspect the pale curtain, floorboard edges and darkest doorway at your intended size. Heavy sharpening can outline gentle transitions; automatic contrast can turn a quiet room into a stark black-and-white design. Neither change recovers missing information.

Hammershøi’s appeal lies partly in those small distinctions. A good reproduction leaves room for them—and a good source record tells you exactly which room you are looking at.