Whenever there is an exhibition of the Symbolist painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, his quietude is invoked. When he was shown at the Guggenheim in New York 10 years ago, partly through the efforts of the late Robert Rosenblum, who helped revive international interest in a master neglected since his untimely death at age 52 in 1916, the show was subtitled “Danish Painter of Solitude and Light.” At the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., in 1983, it was “Stillness and Light.” And now, at London’s Royal Academy, in his first solo show in Britain since 1907, a major retrospective promises “The Poetry of Silence.”

Of course, all painting is silent and still, though, if battle scenes are depicted or if bright color and agitated brushstrokes are deployed, those intrinsic qualities are subverted. The work of Hammershøi, on the contrary, accentuates the mystery of frozen time in uneventful subjects marked by painterly reticence. He is an artist of exquisite poise and meditative calm.

His palette is consistently muted, although once the visitor’s eyes grow accustomed to his muddy tones, subtle shades do begin to assert themselves in richness and unexpected range. He generally sticks to shades of gray and of brown. The majority of his images are interiors at twilight hours. Rare forays out of doors are mostly cityscapes on misty mornings or overcast days. Whether he is painting buildings or the rooms of his apartment, the scenes are either depopulated or inhabited by a solitary figure, most usually his wife, Ida, typically dressed in modest, dark hues and with her back turned to the viewer.

But subdued does not necessarily mean glum. Pierre Bonnard, who almost always painted in a cheery, high-chroma palette, asserted that “one does not always sing out of happiness.” Hammershøi (who incidentally thought Bonnard “complete rubbish”) could be saying that one is not always subdued on account of depression, expressing a spectrum of moods, despite the melancholy associations of his washed-out palette. Quietude does not automatically signal disquietude in the way many Hammershøi commentators, relating his gloomy palette to his neurasthenia, tend to assume.

Unlike Bonnard, Hammershøi was also reticent about his intentions, disclosing little in interviews, letters, or statements. This was of a piece with the privacy of the world his work describes. The majority of his canvases depict the interiors in which he and his wife lived, which were crafted to be as restrained, refined, and austere as the paintings of them would be. In terms of interior décor, the Hammershøis were minimalists ahead of their time, with a chromophobia that fused aestheticism and asceticism.

For the most productive decade of his short career, between 1898 and 1909, the artist lived in the same apartment at 30 Strandgade in the Christianshavn district of Copenhagen. Before moving in, the Hammershoi’s had all the moldings and woodwork painted a uniform white, the walls dressed in gray, and the floorboards stained dark. The extensive interconnecting rooms were sparsely furnished with choice early-19th-century pieces — a hefty sofa, a boxy piano — which, together with items such as a distinct blue-and-white punch bowl or a crisp, short tablecloth, feature almost as personages in the carefully composed interiors of Hammershøi’s paintings. These are often essays in delicate, subtle lighting, with fabric or flesh picking out the slight, refracted sunlight trickling through double windows.

The Hammershois’s living space brings to mind the monastic austerity of Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio as photographed by André Kertesz. Alternatively, it could be said that the Hammershøis chose to live as if in Dutch paintings of the 17th century, which were clearly a formal touchstone for Hammershøi. Several paintings, such as “Woman Reading (Strandgade 30)” (1908), directly evoke Vermeer — a prophetic choice in view of Hammershøi’s dip and revivial of posthumous reputation, shared with the Dutch master..

Hammershoi’s style also harked back to another Golden Age, to the early-19th-century Danish painters, such as Christian Købke, Constantin Hansen, and C.W. Eckersberg, whose clean, sharp, distilled realism had the streamlined simplicity of Biedemeier furniture. Except Hammershøi added — or subtracted — from their cheery, crystalline touch his diffuse, mysterious haze. Hammershøi also, arguably, looked forward to other maverick intimists of the 20th century, such as Giorgio Morandi and Gwen John, who shared his distilled quietism and monomaniacal returns to near identical motifs.

While Hammershøi’s low-key palette fits his individual temperament and also conforms to what is often perceived to be a typically Nordic introspectiveness, it equally relates to an international strain in late-19th-century aestheticism that affected very different personality types and nationalities: His “Portrait of a Young Woman: The Artist’s Sister Anna Hammershøi” (1885), which aroused controversy in the highly conservative Danish Academy when exhibited in the year it was made, looks closely to Whistler, one of the few contemporaries he openly admired. Hammershøi’s penchant for the near-monochrome also relates to the Frenchman Eugène Carrière.

One of the things about Hammershøi’s portrait of his sister that annoyed establishment forces was its irresolute focus, and a shimmering soft edginess would remain a characteristic of his touch, even in paintings in which, ironically, minute observation of precise edges was the principal “focus” of attention. “Interior, Strandgade 30” (1908) shows Ida, seated with her back to us and her head bowed slightly, an open door in front of her leading through a second room to a sliver of wide open doorway exposing a window beyond, a secondary source of light. With the floorboards, the moldings, and the fastidiously neat arrangement of furnishings, this is a highly geometric arrangement of planes and angles.

Interiors aside, Hammershøi’s other favorite motif was classical buildings amid dimly lit and depopulated streets. He painted the former Asiatic Company buildings in 1902 at Strandgade 25 — premises he would move into years later when forced to vacate no. 30 — and the British Museum during a productive London stay in 1906. Typically, the painting of the London subject shows the sides of the building rather than the famous, recognizable façade, making it, like his domestic scenes, undemonstrative. The show, which is a very fulsome retrospective, also includes his occasional landscapes, such as “Landscape, Gentofte” (1906), in which the greens are suitably grayish and muted. Even the great outdoors are rendered with interiority by Hammershøi.

Until September 7 (Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, 011-44-20-7300-8000).