Looking Across Eggedal: Harriet Backer’s Hillside Landscape

 

By 1888, Harriet Backer had spent fourteen years abroad. She trained in Munich and worked in Paris alongside Kitty Kielland, absorbing what Impressionism had to teach about light and color. That summer, at forty-three, she left France and came home to Norway. After more than a decade studying light on Parisian walls and Breton farmhouses, she turned to Norwegian valleys.

This painting came from that first summer back. Rural buildings scatter across green slopes in Eggedal, a valley in Buskerud that rises steeply from its farmland floor toward the Norefjell mountains. Three wooden structures sit on the foreground hillside: a barn on the left, a farmhouse with reddish walls in the center, another building to the right. Behind them, more farms climb higher up the slope. A dirt path winds through the grass. Above it all, a low overcast sky rendered in soft grays and pale blues.

The work demonstrates someone applying what she learned abroad to what she found at home. Her brushwork carries Impressionist training: loose paint handling, attention to atmosphere, interest in ordinary rural life. But the subject is different. French Impressionists painted pleasure gardens and riverside promenades. Backer chose working farms on steep terrain in a valley shaped by the Eggedøla River. Not picturesque ruins or sublime wilderness, but the actual landscape people farmed and lived in.

The colors show careful looking. Greens vary across the hillside, darker where trees cluster at the ridge top, lighter where grass catches thin sunlight through clouds. The buildings wear muted browns and reds that anchor the composition without competing with the landscape. The sky takes roughly a third of the canvas, painted with enough variation to read as moving weather rather than flat overcast. This attention to atmosphere came from her Paris years, when she studied how Monet tracked light across surfaces.

The hillside itself makes the painting work. The slope rises from left to right, pulling your eye upward across the composition. Backer emphasized this diagonal movement through her placement of buildings and the snaking path that cuts across the green. The effect is neither picturesque nor dramatic. It simply records how structures sit on uneven ground in mountainous country. Farming here meant building on angles, working with steep gradients. No sentimentalizing.

Other Norwegian artists had painted Eggedal before Backer. Christian Skredsvig kept his studio at Hagen farm just north of the church. The valley's combination of agricultural life and dramatic topography made it natural subject matter for painters interested in Norwegian identity during a period when the country was still politically joined to Sweden. Backer took a different approach from some of her peers. Where some pursued national romanticism with its emphasis on sublime mountain vistas, she stayed focused on how people actually inhabited these landscapes. The barns they built. The paths they walked. The way farms climbed slopes that looked too steep to farm.

The painting's structure shows her thinking through pictorial problems. The foreground barn provides a solid vertical mass on the left. The farmhouse in the middle distance creates a horizontal counterweight. The background rises in distinct layers: more buildings, then dark tree cover along the ridge, then distant mountains. Each layer sits at a different depth.

Her technique here differs notably from the detailed interior scenes that would later define her reputation. The brushwork is quicker, more suggestive. She indicates rather than describes: a few strokes for windows, broader marks for roof shingles, loose handling for foliage and grass. This economy makes sense for landscape work, especially outdoors in changeable weather. It also reflects Impressionist preference for capturing an impression over making inventory.

Still, for all its Impressionist handling, the painting is rooted to place in ways that separate it from French work of the same period. The cool northern light comes at a different angle. The particular green of Norwegian grass in summer. The specific architecture of wooden farm buildings with their steep roofs was built for snow. These details locate the scene precisely in Norway, in Eggedal specifically. Backer was not trying to make the valley look like Normandy or Brittany. She recorded what the Norwegian landscape offered to her trained eye.

1888 was a turning point in Backer's work. After returning, she settled in Sandvika outside Christiania and established the teaching practice that influenced younger artists including Henrik Lund and Halfdan Egedius. Her focus shifted toward interior scenes, church paintings, and explorations of lamplight and domestic space. Landscape painting stuck around in her work, but it never again took the central position it held during this summer.

The valley itself, with its steep slopes and scattered farms, offered subject matter both familiar and fresh. She had learned to paint in Munich and Paris, absorbing techniques from different traditions. But she painted Norway as Norway. What you see is a record of a particular hillside on a particular summer, rendered by someone who had learned to look clearly.