Harriet Backer (1845-1932) The music of color

Although little known outside her own country, Harriet Backer was the most famous female painter in Norway at the end of the 19th century. She achieved a highly personal synthesis of interior scenes and plein-air painting, drawing her inspiration from both the realist movement and the innovations of impressionism with a free brushstroke, a palette that became progressively lighter and a keen interest in variations in light. While Backer's painting evolved stylistically over the course of her long career, she remained faithful to a limited number of subjects and the direct study of her chosen motif. As the sister of a renowned composer, to whom she was very close, she placed music at the heart of her work, both as subject and model, seeking to suggest an atmosphere, an emotion, a moment, through the use of touch, rhythm and subtle colours.  

Returning to Norway in the early 1890s after training in the great European art capitals of Munich and Paris, she opened a mixed school of painting, which became one of the most important in the country before the creation of the Academy of Fine Arts. Sitting on numerous exhibition juries, Backer was also a member of the board of directors and the acquisitions committee of the National Gallery of Norway for twenty years.

Harriet Backer demonstrated a keen taste for drawing and painting from childhood. Like many Norwegian artists, she pursued her training in the major art capitals of Western and Central Europe. With her sister Agathe, who studied piano, she travelled to Berlin and then to Florence. In 1874, they settled for a time in Munich, home to a vibrant community of Scandinavian artists. It was there that Backer met some of her closest friends, including Eilif Peterssen and Kitty Kielland. From her earliest travels abroad, Backer schooled herself by copying ancient masters in museums, with a particular interest in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Her longest period abroad was spent in Paris. She remained there for ten years from 1878 and enrolled in the academy of Madame Trélat de Lavigne, a school for women that was highly appreciated by Nordic artists and whose tutors included Léon Bonnat, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jules Bastien-Lepage. Backer, a keen student of art history, showed an interest in naturalism and also took note of the impressionists.

In Munich and Paris, Harriet Backer met artists from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland who shared her ambition to become a professional painter. Many Scandinavian women went to Germany and France to train in private studios, as the Schools and academies of fine arts remained closed to them.

In Munich in 1875, Harriet Backer befriended Kitty Kielland, a landscape painter and campaigner for women's rights, with whom she shared an apartment-studio for the rest of her life. Their companionship challenged the gender norms of the time. However, such a close union between two women painters was not uncommon at the turn of the twentieth century, with most remaining unmarried to maintain their personal and professional independence.

In Paris in the 1880s, Backer found herself among several Nordic artists completing their training in this artistic capital. It was here that they became professional artists, building up their own networks, exhibiting at the Salon and gaining public and critical recognition. These women artists lived as a community and portrayed each other in cross-portraits in which the studio played the symbolic role of a room of one's own, where independence was won through creativity.

Harriet Backer grew up in a musical home. Her sister Agathe Backer Grøndahl was one of the most important Norwegian composers of her day. Her nephew Johan Backer Lunde, her other sister Inga's son, was also a composer. Like many middle-class women, Backer was a trained pianist. The piano had pride of place in her apartments, in Paris and Kristiania (Oslo), where her music-loving friends would gather for intimate concerts. The painting At Home (1887) shows the author Asta Lie at the piano in the apartment-studio that Backer shared in Paris with her friend Kitty Kielland. The theme of the woman at the piano recurs frequently in Backer's work throughout her career. In the exhibition, it is associated with portraits of her close friends and family, often united around music.  

More than a theme, music was a model for Backer: she wanted this painting to be "music for the eye". Like many artists of her time, she saw music as the aspiration and model for all art. Using brushstrokes, composition and colour, she created rhythms and colourful harmonies that conveyed the impressions produced by music.

"It doesn't matter that I promised to stop painting interiors, torturing myself with lines of perspective and battling with chair legs. As soon as I enter a room with blue and red colours on rustic furniture or matt and shiny walls, where the light reflected by trees and sky enters through a window or door, I rapidly find myself in front of a canvas."

 This is how Harriet Backer described her fascination with rural interiors in a conversation with the painter Christian Krohg. She first tackled the subject in 1881 on a study trip to Brittany with the painters Kitty Kielland and Germain Pelouse. Harriet Backer painted two farms, in the morning and evening respectively, exploring how light transforms colours and atmospheres according to the times of day – an approach that recalls the impressionists. She continued to explore these motifs during her various travels in Norway, indirectly offering a simple and authentic view of everyday life, of contemporary farmers and peasants, although it never become her principal subject.

Church interiors and religious rituals would become important subjects for Harriet Backer following her return to Norway in 1888. They contributed greatly to her reputation in her native country. At a time of political demands for a distinct Norwegian identity, her preference was for old, medieval buildings constructed before Danish and Swedish colonisation. Most of the churches she painted are of Lutheran denomination. Lutheranism is the oldest form of Protestant Christianity, and is still the majority religion in Norway. . Harriet Backer  painted them tirelessly, sometimes in challenging physical conditions due to the building’s bad condition or great isolation, focusing on the architectural elements that give these edifices a singular atmosphere. She pays particular attention to the play of light and colour on the varnished woodwork, the stone and the pews that have tarnished over time, and describes everyday religious ceremonies, reflecting both her altruism for her contemporaries and her humble, personal and introspective vision of faith.

Harriet Backer's interest in landscapes came late. Her earliest known attempts date from the summer of 1884. They are influenced by the naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage, with whom she studied in Paris, and coincide with the taste for outdoor painting that was very much in vogue amongst Nordic artists. Her landscapes combine an intense focus on colour with a freedom of touch reminiscent of impressionism. From June to October 1886, Backer lived on a farm in Fleskum near Oslo, with some of her close friends from Munich. This improvised artistic colony marked the start of a profound movement in painting throughout northern Europe. Together, the works of Kitty Kielland and Eilif Peterssen led to the emergence of a national neo-romanticism that exalts the intrinsic power of Nordic landscapes and identities. It accompanied the increasing demand for political autonomy amongst the Scandinavian countries. Backer only embarked on this path in the subsequent decade, with landscapes centred on denser forms and the dark and mysterious tones that play out in Norwegian nature.

In 1903, Harriet Backer moved into a studio at 2 Hansteensgate in Kristiania (Oslo), where she lived and worked for the rest of her life, alongside her painter friends Kitty Kielland and Asta Nørregaard. Around 1910, she returned to still lifes for the first time since her Munich years.  She painted the secret, silent life of objects, just as she had painted figures in their interiors. She explored the relationship between colour and form through several objects and plants that recur from one painting to the next. Some of her depictions of vases and apples are reminiscent of paintings by Cézanne, and she was referred to by her pupil Henrik Sørensen as his "sister". Another theme she developed in the early twentieth century was the window. She simplified the details and concentrated on this focus of light, liminal space between inside and outside, a recurring motif in her work.

Backer had a second studio, next to her own, where she taught both men and women, which was uncommon at the time. This teaching supplemented her income, since she painted at such a slow rate that she couldn't live on the sale of her paintings alone. As a teacher, she encouraged her pupils to develop their own style. Backer had some considerable influence on the new generation of Norwegian artists.