Interior from the Church Trefoldighetskirken

Painted in 1906 and held by KODE in Bergen, this interior of Trefoldighetskirken (Trinity Church) in Kristiania belongs to the later phase of Harriet Backer's church interior series, which began with her Tanum Church studies in the early 1890s. Trefoldighetskirken, completed in 1858, is a neo-Gothic revival church designed by Christian Heinrich Grosch — architecturally very different from the medieval rural churches Backer had previously depicted. The larger, more elaborately decorated urban church offered different optical problems: higher vaulted ceilings, stained glass that would have coloured the incoming light, and a grander spatial scale that tested her approach to light management in sacred space. Backer continued painting church interiors into the 1910s, treating them as ongoing studies in the relationship between architectural form, spiritual atmosphere, and the behaviour of light in spaces designed for transcendence.

The Gothic revival architecture of Trefoldighetskirken gave Backer vertical proportions and pointed arches rather than the Romanesque horizontals of her earlier medieval church subjects. She responded by extending her tonal range into the deeper shadows of the higher nave while retaining her