Harriet Backer

Harriet Backer painted rooms — ordinary Norwegian rooms with someone quietly at work inside. What she was really after was the light: how it fell through a window, warmed a wooden wall, or turned the air of a room a particular shade of blue.

She left Norway to learn her craft, studying in Munich from 1874 and then living in Paris for a decade, where she took lessons from the academic painters Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme and absorbed the newer French interest in colour and outdoor light. Her breakthrough came in 1883 with 'Blue Interior,' a woman sewing by a window in cool, luminous daylight, usually named as the moment her mature style arrived.

For a woman of her generation a painting career meant real resistance, and Backer built one anyway. The landscape painter Kitty Kielland, a close friend, travelled the same hard road.

Back in Kristiania, today's Oslo, she opened a painting school in 1889 that ran for over a decade and trained many Norwegian artists before the country had a state art academy. She kept exhibiting into old age and died in 1932, at 87.