The Altar at Uvdal Stave Church

Harriet Backer's painting of the altar at Uvdal Stave Church in 1909 engages with one of Norway's most distinctive cultural treasures: the medieval stave churches, wooden structures unique to Scandinavia that had survived from the eleventh and twelfth centuries into modern times through a combination of rural isolation and, later, active preservation. Uvdal Stave Church in Numedal was among the preserved examples, its interior retaining baroque decorative elements added in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that transformed the austere medieval structure into a polychrome ensemble of painted panels, carved altarpieces, and decorative textiles. Backer's characteristic preoccupation with interior light and coloured space found an ideal subject in these richly decorated church interiors, where the limited windows created a warm, intimate glow quite unlike the bright architectural spaces of urban Scandinavian churches. The work is held at KODE in Bergen, an institution with important holdings of Norwegian historical and modern art. Painting in 1909, Backer was in her late fifties and at the full maturity of her expressive powers.

Church interior painting demanded special attention to the management of limited, diffused light characteristic of wooden vernacular architecture. Backer renders the warm tones of the painted wood, the polychrome decorative elements of the baroque altarpiece, and the subdued illumination of the interior with the tonal sensitivity she developed across decades of interior painting. The spatial recession of the nave toward the altar creates compositional depth from a relatively confined setting.