Harriet Backer

Biography

Her sister Agathe played the piano, and Harriet travelled with her on concert tours around Europe and looked at museums along the way. That is how, in her youth, she came to see the old masters, and she took lessons wherever she happened to stop.

Harriet Backer was born on 21 January 1845 in Holmestrand, in Vestfold, one of four daughters of Nils Backer, a shipowner and merchant. The family moved to Christiania (now Oslo) in 1856 or 1857; the sources differ. She began to draw and paint at about the age of twelve, with Joachim Calmeyer, and then studied with Johan Fredrik Eckersberg (1861–1865). In 1866–1867 she studied in Berlin with Alphons Holländer, then with Christen Brun, and in 1871–1874 she attended the painting school of Knud Bergslien. In 1874 she went to Munich and studied there until 1878 with Eilif Peterssen, with whom she was often compared later and who remained a close friend. From 1878 she lived in Paris and took lessons from Léon Bonnat, and according to some accounts also from Jean-Léon Gérôme. One summer she worked in Rochefort-en-Terre in Brittany beside the landscape painter Léon Germain Pelouse; of him she said that he was the most natural man she had ever met. In Paris she shared a studio with the Norwegian artist Kitty Kielland, and in 1880 she made her debut at the Salon with the painting “Solitude”. For three years running, in 1878, 1879 and 1880, she received the Schäffer grant.

In 1883 “Blue Interior” (“Blått interiør”) was shown at the autumn exhibition in Christiania. The critic Andreas Aubert, as the catalogue of a later exhibition tells it, saw in her manner that “every atom is colour”.

In 1888 Backer returned to Norway for good and settled in Sandvika, outside Christiania. From 1889 to 1912 she ran an art school. In Norway this was, in effect, the only way to get a professional training in painting. Her pupils included Harald Sohlberg, Halfdan Egedius, Nikolai Astrup, Henrik Lund, Lars Jorde and Marie Hauge, as well as the future writer Cora Sandel. In 1886 she belonged to the circle of artists who gathered in summer at the Fleskum farm in Bærum. She worked slowly: about 180 paintings are known in all. Her favourite subjects were a room where a lamp or a glowing stove casts long shadows over a chair and is reflected in a mirror (“By Lamplight”, “Ved lampelys”, 1890), and a church interior flooded with summer light. In 1892 she painted, in Tanum church, the rite of the churching of women after childbirth, a custom that fell out of use in the 1920s. Later, in 1904–1909, she worked in the old wooden stave church at Uvdal (the village was then called Opdal) and painted the altar with the central post of the nave. She did not place herself in any movement. She is counted both among the realists and naturalists and among the early Impressionists.

Recognition came in her lifetime. In 1889 she won a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and in 1893 she showed work at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. From 1907 until his death in 1925 she received an annual allowance from the patron Olaf Fredrik Schou. In the same year, 1907, her first solo exhibition was held in Christiania. In 1908 she was awarded the King’s Medal of Merit in gold, in 1912 the Petter Dass Medal, and in 1925 she was made a Knight First Class of the Order of St. Olav. From 1921 she received a state artist’s stipend, and in 1920 she became an honorary member of the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights.

Harriet Backer died at home on 25 March 1932 and was buried at Vår Frelsers gravlund (Our Saviour’s Cemetery) in Oslo. In 1982 a bronze sculpture by Ada Madssen was put up in Holmestrand: Agathe sits looking at the sea, Harriet stands with a palette. Her paintings are held by the National Museum in Oslo, by museums in Bergen and in the Rasmus Meyer collection; in autumn 2023 the National Museum put on the largest exhibition in three decades, about eighty works.