Interior with the artist's wife seen from behind.

Interior with the Artist's Wife Seen from Behind is one of the most characteristic subjects in Hammershoi's entire output: Ida, his wife, turned away from the viewer, absorbed in some unnamed domestic activity within the Strandgade apartment. The back-turned figure was Hammershoi's solution to the problem of depicting a human presence without the social obligation of portraiture: Ida faces away, anonymised into a figure-form that occupies the room like furniture. This 1901 canvas, whose current location is unrecorded, belongs to the sequence of Ida paintings that have become icons of Nordic Symbolist restraint. Her back-turned presence simultaneously invites and denies access to her inner life.

The back-turned figure allowed Hammershoi to treat a human form with the same tonal and spatial analysis he applied to objects. The figure's clothing becomes a surface for light and shadow study, with the dress's fabric providing vertical folds that echo the room's architectural lines.