Two children and a group of trees

This 1885 oil depicting two children near a group of trees offers one of Harriet Backer's rare plein-air subjects that is neither an enclosed interior nor a studio arrangement — placing it in the open-air Naturalist tradition she shared with her contemporaries but less frequently practiced. By 1885, Backer had spent several years in Paris and was deeply familiar with the Naturalist outdoor painting associated with the Barbizon school and its Norwegian heirs. The subject of children in a landscape setting — absorbed in their own world, unconcerned with adult observation — offered a gentler, more intimate version of the plein-air subjects favoured by French Naturalists working in Breton and Normandy villages. Backer's treatment of the outdoor light here may have been informed by her studies with Bastien-Lepage's followers, who advocated for painting figures in open air without artificial studio lighting.

The outdoor setting required Backer to work with the diffused, reflected light of overcast or partially shaded conditions rather than the controlled artificial sources of her interiors. She captured the cool, even light of a Scandinavian summer day through a lighter overall tonality and more broken