The early years of Harriet Backer’s career saw her progress from early Salon-ready realism to the more painterly and colourful style of her personal interpretation of Impressionism. Her landscapes captured the intensity of the Norwegian summer, and she had been exploring the play of light indoors in interiors. By 1890, her career was established, her art recognised and increasingly appreciated, and she had started teaching. She now turned her attention from the play of natural light to that of lamplight.

Syende kvinne ved lampelys (By Lamplight) (1890) reverses the lighting of her previous interiors. Now the view through the window is the blackness of night, and the interior is lit by a kerosene lamp on the table inside. The play of light is changed into the play of shadow, with the woman’s shadow magnified on the wall behind her.

Her Aften, interiør (Evening, Interior) (Reading) (1890) takes this further, and shows the influence of Japonisme, particularly in the scarlet lampshade at the right. Backer shows how the harsh directional light casts strange shadows with the effect of altering our reading of facial features, the folds in clothing, and magnifying the shadow on the wall. Although the light doesn’t create the woman and the objects around her, by determining how we see her, it transforms our perceptions and interpretation.

Kone som syr (Woman Sewing) (1890) takes us back to more familiar daytime lighting, as a woman (a wife in the Norwegian title) sits at her sewing. This appears to have been a quick oil sketch, with its gestural depictions of potted plants, table, and chair, going beyond Impressionism.

In her Pike ved vinduet (Girl by the window) (1891), the girl looks out from the sunlit interior to a world we cannot discern, beyond the miniature internal world of chair, stove, and potted plants.

Inngangskoner (Churching) (1892) shows a traditional ceremony in which a woman who has just completed the confinement following the birth of her child is received back at church, where she gives thanks for the survival of her baby and herself, and prays for their continuing health. This is believed to show the sacristy to the left of the altar in Tanum Kirke, in Bærum, Norway. Backer marks this important moment in a mother’s life with the light of hope, as emergence from the suffuse light of the nursery.

The next event in the life of mother and baby is shown in her Barnedåp i Tanum Kirke (Christening in Tanum Church) (1892), one of Backer’s most sophisticated paintings. Again she places the viewer inside, looking now both outward and inward.

The left of the canvas takes the eye deep through the church door to the outside world, where a mother is bringing her child in for infant baptism. The rich green light of that outside world colours the heavy church door, and its inner wood panelling, and the floorboards and perspective projection bring the baptismal party in.

At the right, two women are sat in an enclosed stall waiting for the arrival of the baptismal party. One has turned and partly opened the door to their stall in her effort to look out and see the party enter church. Backer controls the level of detail and looseness to brilliant effect, ensuring we always see just what she wants us to, enough to bring the image to life, but never so much that our attention becomes lost in the irrelevant.

This painting of the ages of woman is believed to have been influenced by Wilhelm Leibl’s (1844-1900) Three Women in Church (1882), which Backer had seen when studying in Munich. She considered this to be her greatest painting, and it was favourably received when exhibited at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893.

Gamlestua på Kolbotn (Old Living Room at Kolbotn) (1896) is an intimate view of the living room of a farm in Østerdalen, Norway. Friends of the artist Hulda and Arne Garborg are seen sat at the table, Arne holding his fiddle. Behind them are paintings, among them two landscapes painted by Backer’s friend Kitty Kielland. Kielland, Backer and the Garborgs had first met in Paris in 1885.

Backer hadn’t abandoned landscapes, but they too had moved on from regular Impressionism. Einundfjell (1897) shows her skills in capturing the more subtle light and colour of twilight. The bright surface of the distant lake separates the dark hills behind from the more colourful meadows of the foreground.

Thorvald Boecks bibliotek (Thorvald Boeck’s Library) (1902) is one of Backer’s few interiors devoid of people, here replaced by books from floor to ceiling. The intricate detail of their many spines, furniture, and other decorations contrasts markedly with the bare floorboards in the foreground.

In 1907, Backer had her first solo exhibition in Oslo. During that first decade of the twentieth century, her interiors switched away from the intimacy of the rural home, to those of Norway’s country churches.

Of the many wonderful later paintings that she made of church interiors, the finest must be Uvdal Stave Church (1909).

Stave churches were once numerous throughout Europe, but are now only common in rural Norway. Their construction is based on high internal posts (staves) which give them a characteristic tall, peaked appearance. Uvdal is a particularly good example, dating from around 1168. As with many old churches, its interior has been extensively painted and decorated, and this has been allowed to remain, unlike many painted churches in Britain which suffered removal of all such decoration.

Backer’s richly-coloured view of the interior of the church is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, again manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.

This is an expression of Backer’s own deep religious beliefs, her career-long exploration of lit interiors, and her profound love of her native country and its people.

In 1912, the year that she retired from teaching, she was awarded the gold King’s Medal of Merit, and in 1921 was made the State Laureate in Painting (Statens kunstnerlønn), an appointment previously held by Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Grieg. She was the first woman to be so appointed. She is known to have completed about 180 paintings in all before she died in Oslo on 25 March 1932, and the grand old age of 87.

References

Wikipedia (English), Wikipedia (Norwegian).
Many of her best paintings are in Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, where they’re viewable online.

Harriet Backer (1845–1932) is one of Norway’s most famous artists, a pioneering woman painter, and an influential teacher. Despite an internationally successful career, she’s now hardly known outside her native country. This is the first of two articles in which I show a small selection of her finest paintings.

Born into a wealthy family living at Holmestrand on the west bank of Oslofjord, south of Oslo, she showed an early aptitude for drawing. When the family moved to Oslo in 1857 she was originally sent to a school for governesses. She started drawing and painting lessons in Oslo in 1867, and was able to travel in the company of her sister, the concert pianist and composer Agathe Backer-Grøndahl. Her talent was recognised, and in 1874 she went to Munich where she became a pupil of her compatriot Eilif Peterssen.

Avskjeden (The Farewell) (1878) was probably Backer’s first successful painting. It shows a grown daughter, left of centre, bidding farewell to her family as she leaves home. She probably painted this from her own emotional experience, as her father died in 1877, and she had informed her mother that she did not intend returning home, but would pursue her painting career instead.

It also marked the year that she went to Paris, where she was a pupil of Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme, and for a brief time of Jules Bastien-Lepage.

In France, her style started to loosen up: Solitude from about 1880 was another early success, and her first painting accepted for the Salon that year. This was one of her first interiors featuring limited light, whose play was to become a dominant theme in her paintings. Although she remained based in Paris, she returned to Norway each summer, where she seems to have painted mostly landscapes.

Asta Nørregard, another Norwegian painter studying in Paris at the time, modelled for her Blått interiør (Blue Interior) (1883). This develops the theme of the play of light from the window on the person and contents of the interior of the room, its composition complicated by the large mirror at the left. Her brushstrokes are now overtly painterly, and bright colours are starting to bring harmonies and contrasts.

To barn og tregruppe (Two children and a group of trees) (1885) is a good example of Backer’s summer landscapes, which were probably at least started en plein air, if finished in the studio, perhaps. She had learned to paint outdoors in Paris, where it had become generally popular, not just among the Impressionists.

På Bleikeplassen, Jæren (At the Bleaching Place, Jæren) (1886) is a pure plein air oil sketch, in which time didn’t permit the addition of details to the buildings or figures. It shows three women hard at work laying linen garments out to bleach in the sunshine.

På blekevollen (Bleaching Linen) (1886-7) is a more finished painting of similar activity. At this time her style was clearly Impressionist, but expressed in her distinctive manner.

Back in Paris, she continued to explore the play of light in interiors, with Chez Moi from 1887 as an example. She strikes a good balance between fine detail and the more painterly: the piano keys, dress, plant, and reflections on the pictures hanging on the wall, are each shown with precision.

In 1888 she finally returned to Norway and settled in Sandvika, on the outskirts of Oslo. There she continued to concentrate on interiors, including those illuminated by lamplight.

During the summer, she still went out into the rich countryside to paint en plein air and capture the glorious colours of the intense Norwegian summer. Her Landskap fra Ulvin (Landscape from Ulvin) (1889) is a good example; sadly, relatively few of her landscapes seem to have made their way into public collections, remaining in private ownership and inaccessible.

Growing recognition, including the award of a silver medal at the Exposition Internationale of 1889, brought requests for her to take on pupils, and in that year she started teaching in what soon developed into a thriving art school. The final years of the 1800s and the start of the new century marked the peak of her career, with a succession of major paintings in addition to that teaching, as I’ll show in next week’s second and concluding article.

References

Wikipedia (English), Wikipedia (Norwegian).
Many of her best paintings are in Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, where they’re viewable online.