“Harriet Backer: The music of colors,” Museé d’Orsay, Paris, 2024

Harriet Backer (1845–1932) had an obsession. “It doesn’t matter that I promised to stop painting interiors, torturing myself with lines of perspective and battling with chair legs,” she once told the fellow Norwegian painter Christian Krohg in a conversation. “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.” [1]

Consequently, in Backer’s paintings, one encounters an excess of wooden chairs, wooden beds, wooden tables, wooden benches and dressers, wooden flooring, wooden bookshelves, flowers and plants neatly arranged, pianos played or abandoned to silence, lampshades, still lifes of fruit bowls and vases. These interiors are populated by Norwegian peasants or by her artist friends, usually women, often depicted as active and independent. In one of the first works on display in the current retrospective on show at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, titled “The Music of Color,” Backer’s brushstrokes trace the fickle nature of daylight: its bluish tones, its somber shades on the yellowish walls, its movement across the artist’s blue dress, the blue shelf, the blue pillows atop the wooden chairs. Painted in Paris, Blue Interior (1883) was exhibited in Oslo and Copenhagen to widespread praise. [2] Backer was one of the few female Scandinavian artists who managed to find success during her lifetime. Today, she is largely unknown outside of her home country.

Harriet Backer, “Blue Interior,” 1883

Harriet Backer was born in Holmestrand, south of Oslo. Growing up in a household of art and music, she showed early signs of artistic promise. However, she was unable to apply to the Oslo art academy due to its policy of only admitting men. In 1874, she followed her sister Agathe to Munich instead, where Agathe, who would go on to become an acclaimed pianist and composer, moved to continue her musical studies. The city’s art academy likewise remained closed to women, but there was a larger artistic scene and greater possibilities of private tutoring. Soon, Backer became a pupil of the German portrait painter Lambert Linder and, later, the Norwegian painter Eilif Peterssen, both of whom worked in the predominant style of the time: a realism characterized by dusky tones and a deep attention to details. After moving to Paris in 1878, she enrolled at Madame Trélat de Lavigne’s school for women – a school for women, where Jean-Léon Gérôme and Léon Bonnat were among the instructors – and became acquainted with the Impressionist movement. Blue Interior, completed five years after her arrival in the French capital, marks this stylistic shift: Backer had grown keen on capturing light. But ever drawn to interiors, she was not a plein air painter herself; she painted inside – and she painted decisively slowly. Her preoccupation with the effects of the outside light on the inside led some critics to declare that she was painting the “outdoors indoors.” [3]

In Evening, Interior (1896), the work adorning the very first wall of the exhibition, Backer applies her colors in a dazzling manner, portraying a young girl reading an unfolded letter in the radiant light flowing out from behind a reddish lampshade that appears to be strikingly similar to a Chinese hand fan. On the faded artichoke-colored wall behind the sitter, her shadow looms dark and large. Hints of the crimson glow filtered through the red lampshade touch her cheek facing the light – or is it perhaps a slight blushing? A discreet hint of the contents of the letter? Having moved past this first painting and alongside a curved partition wall which featured texts introducing the artist and her biography, one arrives back in the very same room, though not to find more paintings by Backer: the first full room of exhibits happens not to be dedicated to her, but to a collective of female Scandinavian painters.

Harriet Backer, “Evening, Interior,” 1896

A significant part of the Musée d’Orsay exhibition is devoted to the circle of Scandinavian artists and musicians – among these Jeanna Bauck, Kitty Kielland, Sigrid Lindberg, Asta Nørregaard, and Bertha Wegmann – that Backer became a part of in Munich and later in Paris, and which would become consequential for her, professionally and privately. Particularly the landscape painter Kitty Kielland was a lifelong companion for her. Having met in Munich in 1875, they travelled to Paris and lived there together, an arrangement which continued for the rest of their lives. Neither of them ever married, and while it is unknown whether their relationship was platonic or romantic (Backer’s correspondence with the two people closest to her, Agathe Backer and Kitty Kielland, is not known to have survived [4] ), it is certain that their relationship challenged the gender norms at the time. The writer Arne Garborg, whom Kielland portrayed in 1887, sitting in their artists’ studio, pen in hand, yellow flowers resting in a glass vase on the table in front of him, wrote about them that they were “kind people, bachelors like me, and we should get along well were it not that they always have so many opinions about men.” [5]

Almost 140 years later, art history has done little to engage with the matter of queerness and historical visibility of lesbian women and artists in relation to Backer. The nature of her and Kielland’s possible queerness remains a wholly unexplored avenue in this first-ever major retrospective outside of her home country. This could be explained by Backer’s tendency toward strict privacy, would it not appear to mirror the approach taken by the museum for its previous Rosa Bonheur exhibition in 2022. Celebrating the bicentenary of that artist’s birth with a similar major retrospective, they did so without ever truly engaging with Bonheur’s importance not just as a feminist but also as a lesbian artist who might have understood themselves as trans, nonbinary, or genderqueer, and who boldly challenged the gender norms of the time, helping to pave the way for other LGBT+ artists. [6]

Harriet Backer, “Farmhouse Interior, Skotta, Bærum,” 1887

While the curatorial framing leaves an engagement with queerness to be desired yet again, it does feel refreshing to see women from this period, actual women, engaged or pensive, playing music or contemplating the horizon, portrayed not like, for example, the ever-angelic Marie Krøyer in P. S. Krøyer’s oeuvre, or the elusive female figures of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s famous gray-toned interiors, only ever sketched – rather creepily – from the back, a mere fantasy of the male mind. Here there appears to be no obvious ego present, but rather an affection, to the people and the craft, and as a way of confirming their kinship; their paintings show up on the walls of each other’s interiors. Full of bright light, full of instruments, full of women, all portraited by women, the paintings by Backer’s friends and contemporaries glisten next to each other in their earnestness, in their subtle devotion. Still, this curatorial decision is also a contentious one: to dedicate the first room of the first major retrospective of a painter outside her home country predominantly to other artists’ work. Surely, there are vital points to be made with these inclusions, although having at this time spent less than ten minutes in the exhibition, I was already longing to see more Backer paintings.

I found them; I found the blue of Blue Interior in the next room, in the gleaming blue shirt worn by art historian Vedastine Aubert, seated in front of an emerald-green closet, in Backer’s portrait of her close friend from circa 1910. In a following room, dedicated to the Norwegian painter’s passion for rustic interiors, I also saw the blue color lingering on the walls of Woman Sewing (1890) and By Lamplight (1890), two paintings from a series of interiors painted in Sandvika in the Norwegian countryside, after her return to Norway in 1888, that illustrate Backer’s abilities at their very finest. Now, the brushstrokes seem freer, intuitive, less guided by precision. Textiles, worn or hanging off the walls such as in the painting Farmhouse Interior, Skotta, Bærum (1887), are no longer meticulous seams and folds, but pure blobs of color, ungoverned, vivid. Once again, the inspiration from the Impressionists is evident, though simultaneously these works seem to exist entirely on their own: slow-painted, slow-burning interiors, filled with careful renderings of light and shade and chiaroscuro effects around glowing lamps. A testament to the intricate studies that the young Backer did of the old masters as a student in Munich, making copies after paintings at the Alte Pinakothek, as well as to her lifelong admiration of the Dutch painters of the 17th century, especially Rembrandt.

In 1903, Backer and Kielland moved into a studio at 2 Hansteensgate in Oslo that would become their home for the remainder of Backer’s life. Additionally, they had a second studio, functioning as an art school. Despite experiencing an increasing popularity in her home country after the turn of the century, Backer was still painting slowly – too slowly to live off her work. She therefore supplemented her finances with the teaching income. At the school, they did not merely admit women but made a point of teaching men and women side by side, something unheard of at the time. Through her teaching, Backer became an important tutor for a next generation of artists such as Nikolai Astrup, Ragnhild Kaarbø, Helga Ring Reusch, and Cora Sandel. [7]

Harriet Backer, “Interior from Uvdal Stave Church,” 1909

Backer’s interiors from the 1920s and 1930s appear to have wholly abandoned the rigid structure of her previous works for the sake of a loose, colorful ambience. Still, however well-executed and evocative, these paintings remain slightly less original than her previous endeavors. Among those is Backer’s only garden painting, finished in 1892: a work bright, green, and busy, immediately inviting to one’s eyes with its old, sculptural trees and lush vegetation, as well as its discreet bursts of blue, yellow, and pink wildflowers in between the tall grass. Still, the exterior appears to lean a little too heavily on the evident Claude Monet inspiration, making it less distinctly a Backer painting. Similarly, the still lifes are vivid and impressive, but haunted by the fingerprints of Paul Cézanne, which are everywhere to be found.

More alluring are the church interiors she painted following her return to Norway. Seemingly less interested in the religious rituals, Backer maps the color of the benches and ceiling, the light flowing in from the windows, and the shadows lurking across the floor in these works, which fill one of the last rooms of the exhibition. Often, in classic Backer style, the focus of the paintings simply turns away from the altar, ignoring more emblematic motifs, leaving one with the feeling of being a small child seated in the church benches, staring longingly out the open door at the end, dreaming of immersing oneself in that shimmering greenish light from the outside.

“Harriet Backer: The Music of Colors,” Musée d’Orsay, September 24, 2024–January 12, 2025.

Mads Kirk is a Danish writer based in Berlin. He graduated from the Royal College of Art MA program in writing and has written for art magazines such as ArtReview.

Image credits: 1. © Musée d'Orsay / Sophie Crépy; 2. + 3. + 4. © Oslo National Museum / Børre Høstland; 5. © Kode / Dag Fosse