Interior from Uvdal Stave Church

Painted in 1909 and held by KODE in Bergen, this interior of Uvdal Stave Church represents Harriet Backer's engagement with one of Norway's most historically significant architectural forms. Uvdal Stave Church in Numedal, Viken county, is one of the best-preserved medieval stave churches in Norway, with origins possibly dating to the thirteenth century and a wooden construction using the distinctive stavkirke technique of upright wooden posts. The stave church as a subject carried particular cultural and national significance for Norwegian artists and intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the stavkirke was considered a uniquely Norwegian architectural form, the symbol of a pre-Reformation spiritual culture and of national historical identity. Backer's decision to paint a stave church interior in 1909 — at 64 years old — reflected both her sustained engagement with sacred space and her participation in the broader Norwegian interest in medieval national

The stave church's dark, timber-framed interior with its low light levels presented Backer with radically different optical conditions from the whitewashed Norwegian Lutheran churches she had previously painted.