Harriet Backer
Norway’s painter of interiors.
Harriet Backer painted the light in cottages and churches and was a central teacher for Norwegian artists.
Harriet Backer was born in 1845 in Holmestrand in Norway. She grew up in a cultured family. Her sister Agathe Backer Grøndahl became a well-known pianist and composer, and music played a large part in Harriet’s life and art. She took lessons in drawing and painting in Kristiania, present-day Oslo, from several Norwegian artists.
From 1874 to 1878 she studied in Munich together with her friend, the painter Kitty Kielland. She then lived for ten years in Paris. There she was influenced by the Impressionists’ bright colours and their interest in light, but she retained a firmer sense of form. Her Blue Interior (1883) in the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo shows a woman sewing in a room filled with blue light.
Backer became above all a painter of interiors. She depicted homes, living rooms and churches, and the light that falls through windows and spreads through the room. Her colours are warm and deep, and the mood still and intimate. Baptism in Tanum Church (1892) in the Nasjonalmuseet is one of her best-known works. She worked very slowly and carefully and painted relatively few works over a long life.
In 1892 she opened a painting school in Kristiania, which she ran for almost twenty years. It became one of the most important art schools in Norway, and many of the next generation of Norwegian artists were her pupils. Harriet Backer never married. She died in 1932 and is today regarded as one of Norway’s foremost painters.