The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) has acquired one of the most significant 19th-century paintings in its history, a masterpiece by Danish Modernist Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916).

Acquired from Agnews, London, the painting is the first interior created by Hammershøi that is entirely devoid of people — a poetic vehicle for his nuanced psychological portraits of the experience of domestic spaces that resonates today.

Titled “The Danish Painter of Solitude and Light” by the breakthrough 1998 retrospective organized by art historian Robert Rosenblum, the Hammershøi’s hauntingly melancholic, nearly monochromatic interiors have caused some to call him “The Danish Vermeer.”

The painting was obtained in honor of the tenure of recently retired director Larry Feinberg who said: “I am absolutely delighted that the museum has acquired this beautiful and very important painting in my honor.

“I have long studied and admired the works of 19th-century Symbolist artists, and Hammershøi is the greatest of the Danish symbolists. This is among the most significant acquisitions of 19th-century art that the museum has made in decades.”

While the Hammershøi’s enigmatic depictions of solitary figures in anonymous empty rooms have been compared to the work of the American 20th-century figure painter Edward Hopper, Hammershøi’s art was very much of its generation, SBMA said.

He is typically thought of as a participant in international Symbolism, though he never personally identified with any specific school or movement.

Symbolism was a European art movement that emerged between the two world wars, characterized by a fascination with interior psychological states and the dark side of humanity.

Hammershøi’s early penchant for allegorical compositions that feel heavy with nostalgia for a pre-modern age have much in common with those of the French symbolist Puvis de Chavannes, or the Swiss symbolist Ferdinand Hodler.

But it was for his domestic interiors that Hammershøi earned the most critical accolades. The new SBMA painting is the first such interior he did, completely devoid of people. Its striking modernity belies its early date of 1888.

As the artist put it: “I have always thought there was such beauty about a room like that, even though there are no people in it, perhaps precisely because there are no people in it …”

In “The Danish Painter of Solitude and Light” the subject remains ambiguous. The period rooms are emptied of the trace of everyday living, save for an imposing, old-fashioned jamb stove, of a kind made popular starting in the 18th century.

Its abandonment underscores the absence of the sound of social interaction that the stove attracted in Victorian parlors, and the open door at center leads to another door, this time closed, as if to frustrate our desire to enter the space.

As the poet and admirer of Hammershøi, Rainer Maria Rilke once observed: “Hammershøi is not one of those about whom one must speak quickly. His work is long and slow, and at whichever moment one apprehends it, it will offer plentiful reasons to speak of what is important and essential in art.”

Santa Barbara Museum of Art is at 1130 State St. Weekday hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; free entry 5-8 p.m. Thursdays. For more, call 805-963-4364, or visit www.sbma.net.