The Hammershøi rooms
Grey light and empty interiors, the best-known Danish painting.
JRodSilva — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jiří Komárek — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Fred Romero from Paris, France — CC BY 2.0 · Richard Mortel from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — CC BY 2.0
**SMK** is Denmark's largest art museum, built around the collection of the Danish kings, begun in the sixteenth century and later transferred to the state. It is really two buildings: a heavy, ornamented facade of 1896, and behind it a **long glass wing** added in 1998, with a raised glazed passage between them. Moving between the two is the best part of the building itself. The collection covers seven centuries. Its strongest holdings are old European — **Rembrandt**, **Rubens**, **Titian**, **Cranach** — alongside the world's broadest gathering of the **Danish Golden Age**, and the silent interiors of **Vilhelm Hammershøi**, whose empty grey-lit rooms are probably the most recognisable paintings any Dane has made. The modern section holds **Matisse** and **Picasso** and a strong run of twentieth-century Danish and Norwegian work. Note: **entry to the permanent collection is free**; the ticket is for temporary exhibitions only.
Grey light and empty interiors, the best-known Danish painting.
The 1998 addition, joined to the old building by a glazed passage.
The world's broadest gathering of Danish painting from 1800 to 1850.
Sølvgade 48-50, Copenhagen
A short period roughly between 1800 and 1850 in which Copenhagen — a small, broke city just out of a war, a British bombardment and the state bankruptcy of 1813 — produced a disproportionate amount of painting, literature and philosophy. In painting it means quiet everyday scenes in clear northern light: harbours, rooms, and the faces of ordinary individuals, rather than grand mythological subjects. Its leading names are **Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg** and **Christen Købke**. The same period holds **Søren Kierkegaard** and **Hans Christian Andersen**. The galleries devoted to it here are the first place to understand it.
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