[ART] Harriet Backer - A Master of Light and Color 🎨

Among those who paved the way for female artists in the 19th century, Harriet Backer (1845-1932) was one of the most important. Backer is perhaps the foremost colorist among the Nordic 1880s painters. Her paintings are characterized by bright color contrasts and a free brushwork.

Harriet Backer's breakthrough painting was "Blue Interior", painted in Paris in 1883. Her friend, the painter Asta Nørregaard, sits in a chair sewing, in a beautiful living room belonging to a Norwegian merchant in Paris. The light falls into the room from the unseen window behind the thick, blue drape. It illuminates the large plant near the window, the red cabinet and the model. Although Backer shows that she has received impulses from French impressionism (she had visited a large Monet exhibition the same year), she is still astonishingly traditional in her choice of motives. Interiors and the home arena had already become the domain of female artists, and Backer shows no will or desire to separate from this tradition. The solid foundation in the academic tradition is also noticeable in the strict composition of the image and the solid plastic modeling of the figure. The uneventful stillness, the relationship between figure and space, between figure and the source of light, even brings to mind Vermeer - at that time a newly rediscovered artist.

The light in "Blue Interior" frees the colors from the objects and spreads them as reflexes around the room. The blue color penetrates the atmosphere, is taken up by the objects and dominates our experience of the image. The light seems to be shaping the forms in the dark parts of the image, while it dissolves the shapes in the lighter. This exploration of the dualistic character of light would become an essential ingredient in Harriet Backer's art and places her among the greatest Norwegian painters of all time.

 @SteemSwede

Sources:

Lange, Marit Ingeborg (1995) Harriet Backer
Varnedoe, Kirk (1988) Northern Light: Nordic Art at the Turn of the Century
Borzello, Frances (2006) At home: the domestic interior in art