Christening in Tanum Church

Harriet Backer thought this was the best thing she ever painted. She made it in 1892 inside the old church at Tanum, near Oslo, and what she was really after was the light. The interior is dim, and then the doors at the back stand open and daylight pours in, catching a young woman who carries a baby toward the front for its christening while the congregation waits in the gloom. Backer had trained in Munich and Paris and spent years learning to hold together a warm lamp-lit dark and a cold outdoor brightness in one room. The year after she finished it, the picture crossed the Atlantic to hang in the Norwegian section of the world's fair in Chicago in 1893.