Harriet Backer
Musée d'Orsay
Harriet Backer
Musée d'Orsay
Exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay
Harriet Backer: The music of colours
Harriet Backer: The music of colours
Exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay
until 12 January 2025
Manet, Monet, Gaugin, van Gogh, Degas… The list of great artists at the Musée d’Orsay is almost endless. As a counterbalance, the museum has also made it its mission to familiarise a wider public with lesser-known artists.
One of them is Harriet Backer (1845-1932). She is considered the most renowned artist in Norway at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her daring style between realism and impressionism, with bold colours and musical liveliness, is unparalleled. She received numerous awards and was in demand as an expert (among other things, she sat on the committee that selected the new acquisitions for the National Museum in Oslo).
Her works can now be seen for the first time in a solo exhibition in France.
Harriet Backer
Tickets
The details
at a glance
Exhibition:
Harriet Backer: The Music of Colours
Exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay
until 12 January 2025
Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday to Sunday: 9.30 am – 6.00 pm
Thursdays, 9.30 am – 9.45 pm
Monday day off
Prices:
EUR 16 for adults
EUR 13 for EU citizens between the ages of 18 and 25
free admission for children under 18
Online fee at the Orsay Museum: EUR 1. And you have to register with a password etc.
50 cent more with us, but you are supporting our work. 
ICOM-Card
ICOM members receive free admission on presentation of their card, of course.
Audio guide
Get one of the devices that are handed out after ticket control. This will provide you with information about the individual works – many of them are also accompanied by a brief description. Price: EUR 6 (collection and main exhibition)
You can then read the information texts on the individual rooms, in which the works are arranged thematically, on the wall.
Or download the audio guide to your mobile phone. Price: EUR 4 – app download only for the exhibition, only in French or English.
The artist was born in Holmestrand, Norway, and grew up as one of four sisters. She has been interested in painting and drawing since childhood. Her family encouraged her ambitions and she received her first lessons at the age of 12.
However, there was a lack of further education opportunities in Norway and many schools were closed to her as a woman. Fortunately, she was allowed to accompany one of her younger sisters to the major European metropolises for her piano training. This gave her the opportunity for her first encounters with masterpieces of painting outside Norway. She later spent four years in Munich and ten years in Paris, where she attended various art schools and practised by copying famous works in major museums such as the Louvre (a copy of Rembrandt’s ‘The Good Samaritan’ can be seen in the exhibition).
During her two stays abroad, she met various female artists from the Nordic countries, with whom she shared studios. One of them was located in the immediate vicinity of the Musée d’Orsay. It was here that she developed her admiration for Monet, whose influence can clearly be seen in her Impressionist paintings.
She was closest to Kitty Kielland, with whom she shared her life and work from 1875 until her death.
At the beginning of the 1890s, she opened a painting school for men and women in Oslo, which was very unusual at the time. She organised her life as she wished – but without making socially critical or political statements. She once said that people didn’t ask Rembrandt or other great painters about their moral correctness either.
About the artist
Who was Harriet Backer?
The exhibition begins with works from the circle of female artists that Harriet Backer gathered around her. One of them shows her in her studio in Paris, making a portrait of Kitty Kielland (which can also be seen in the exhibition) and it was painted by – the very same Kitty. It is not the only work in which the artists portrayed each other. This illustrates how important this network was for Backer.
Alongside – or rather together with – art, music played a central role in Harriet’s life. Her grandmother and mother were very musically inclined, and her sister was a well-known composer and performer. She herself took piano lessons and in each of her studio flats, a piano was enthroned in the centre of the room. Many of her motifs show people at the piano and their listeners. She once said that she wanted the picture to be ‘music for the eye’.
A minor sensation: one of the pictures she painted in 1890 – showing her nephew at the piano – was initially thought to be a work by Edvard Munch 30 years later. The latter declared that he wished he was the author, which once again testifies to Backer’s talent.
She switches effortlessly between realistic and impressionistic styles, masterfully capturing the light on faces and objects or experimenting with bold colours and shadowy forms. Portraits, still lifes, landscapes, interiors – she painted everything and the exhibition bears witness to this diversity of motifs.
The exhibition
Harriet Backer: The Music of Colours
From around the turn of the century, people only rarely appear in her paintings. One room of the exhibition is dedicated to church interiors, and while the paintings before 1900 still depict rituals such as baptism or communion, in her later works she concentrates entirely on the interior.
In a letter to her sister, she once complained about the ‘invasion of tourists’ (which made me smile a little because I feel the same way when I try to capture the best perspectives of a well-attended exhibition for you 😉).
The last phase of her work is characterised by still lifes and the views she found when looking out of the windows of her flat studio in Kristiania (Oslo). She lived and worked here with Kitty Kielland and Asta Nørregaard until her death in 1932.
When asked about well-known female painters, I could only think of Berthe Morisot and Rosa Bonheur…but then it became difficult. I found it super exciting to expand this circle with Harriet Backer and hope to find even more female artists in the big museums in the future.
Your Anne
Conclusion
Text and image rights: © Céline Mülich, 2024
With the support of Anne Okolowitz.
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