Still Life

Harriet Backer, the most celebrated Norwegian woman painter of the nineteenth century, produced this Still Life in 1916, later in her career when she had long established her reputation through interior scenes and figure paintings combining Impressionist colour with Norwegian particularity. Still life was not Backer's primary genre, making this 1916 canvas something of a departure from her characteristic subject matter — though her attentiveness to light within enclosed spaces, developed across decades of painting domestic interiors, translated naturally into the careful observation of objects in space. The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo holds significant holdings of Backer's work, this canvas among them. By 1916 Backer was in her late sixties, having trained in Munich and Paris in the 1870s and 1880s and returned to Norway to become a central figure of the Scandinavian naturalist-Impressionist generation. The still life's date places it in the context of the First World War, during which Norway maintained neutrality but faced economic and cultural disruption.

Backer brings her characteristic sensitivity to interior light to the still life format, approaching the arrangement of objects as she would approach a sunlit room — observing how illumination falls on surfaces, creates shadow, and transforms colour through reflection. Her brushwork in mature works is fluid and assured, with paint applied in varied thicknesses that respond to the textures of the objects depicted.