Landscape from Bærum

Painted in 1890 and held by the National Museum, this landscape from the Bærum district — the same municipality where Harriet Backer had painted the interior of Tanum Church — represents the local topography of the area west of Kristiania that was thoroughly familiar to her. Bærum's gently rolling landscape of farms, birch forests, and cultivated fields had been a subject for Norwegian painters since the Romantic generation, offering picturesque pastoral scenery easily accessible from the capital. Backer's 1890 visit to the area produced both this landscape and the Tanum Church altar painting from the same year, suggesting that she maintained an ongoing connection with the district. The landscape's 1890 date places it within the concentrated cluster of major works produced in that year — a period of extraordinary artistic productivity in which Backer was simultaneously working on the interior studies, church paintings, and occasional landscape subjects.

Backer brought her interior tonal discipline to this familiar pastoral landscape, avoiding the melodrama of Romantic Norwegian landscape conventions in favour of close observation of local colour and light conditions.