ESSA Stockholm: Chez Moi by Harriet Backer

 

A woman in a blue dress sits at an upright piano. Her fingers hover just above the keys and her face is turned mostly away from the viewer. She is situated just right of center with light streaming in from a window to her left. A violin sits in its opened case on a chair behind her and nondescript paintings adorn the plain walls. Everything in this painting seems to revolve around the woman and the light source across the room from the view seems to invite them into the scene. It is a wonderful painting that reminds me of home.

Since the figure’s face is nondescript, this leads to one of two interesting interpretations. First, the woman could be anyone. The figure is unimportant in the scene, which given her centrality and size relative to the whole composition seems unlikely. The other interpretation is that the woman could be anyone. It could be your mother or your neighbor. It could be you or it could be a stand-in for all women, and since the painting was made by a woman it could show her perspective on the female experience. If the latter is true, then we might interpret the middle-class, domestic setting to be a critique of women’s limited autonomy and their ability to create art nonetheless. 

In any case, the piece was well received and it won a silver medal at the Paris World Fair in 1889. Backer was a prolific artist whose works filled half a floor of the museum where I saw them, so she is clearly a culturally important figure to the Swedish people. The motif of a domestic woman illuminated by light from outside her setting comes up again and again, so she also was clearly contributing to the feminist art of her time. I think these together make Chez Moi a culturally rich piece any cultural capital would like to call their own.