DAHL, Johan Christian Clausen

After working as a decorative painter in his home town of Bergen, Norway, Dahl studied landscape painting at the Copenhagen Academy from 1811 to 1818. Here he was impressed by the work of Jens Juel and Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, but the crucial influence came with a study of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters of landscape. One of them, Allaert Everdingen, had visited Norway and subsequently developed a type of “Nordic landscape” based on his impressions. This style was later taken up by the Norwegian national movement in the nineteenth century. Alongside the “Italian landscape,” the “Nordic landscape” also became established on the Continent early in the century.

Stimulated by his first extensive travels through Norway in 1826, Dahl supplemented his previous range of motifs - waterfalls, moving clouds, and windswept trees - with depictions of the bare plateaus of the high mountain regions and their cloud formations, becoming an innovator in Norwegian as well as German landscape painting. In 1818, he settled at Dresden, where he associated with Caspar David Friedrich and Carl Gustav Carus. In 1824, like Friedrich, he was appointed professor at the Dresden Academy. Dresden and its environs began to feature frequently in his compositions, in which the sky often occupied the larger part of the canvas.

Dahl visited Italy and was fascinated by his impressions of the ever-changing landscape there. It was not the classical landscape but the landscape of light and the different morphology between Italy and the North that inspired him to paint, mostly in small format. Dahl soon became the most famous Norwegian artist of his time, and he is often seen as a forerunner of plein air painting. He was a master of vivid sketches from nature, and practiced a more naturalistic painting than Caspar David Friedrich.

Dyrehaven, officially Jagersborg Dyrehave, is a forest park north of Copenhagen. It is noted for its mixture of huge, ancient oak trees and large populations of red and fallow deer.

In 1820, Dahl made an Italian journey. Staying only briefly in Rome, where the weight of tradition oppressed him, he concentrated on Naples, where the natural scene revealed itself to him in all its multifarity of form and abundance of light. Dahl became completely engrossed in a study of colour nuances and effects of illumination. He had little contact with the German artists working in Italy, meeting frequently only Franz Catel, who may have introduced him to Turner’s watercolour landscapes, which were exhibited in Rome in 1819.

Dahl looked upon the fresh, spontaneous studies he made in the environs of Naples solely as preliminary works for subsequent oils. When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in December 1820, he was among the first to climb the volcano in order to see and depict the phenomenon at first hand. The Oslo painting goes back to this experience. Already in the eighteenth century, depictions of Vesuvius erupting were among the most popular subjects of pictorial reportage, intended not only to satisfy a public thirst for sensations but to embody the aesthetic ideals of the sublime and the picturesque.

The Norwegian painter spent time in Italy in 1820-21, and while in Naples he witnessed the Vesuvius erupting, creating a range of drawings and painted studies of the event from the closest possible range. One of these studies served as the basis for this painting. He repeated the motif six times, a sure indication of its appeal for contemporary audiences.

This painting belongs to a series of pictures showing shipwreck.

Although better know for his smaller scale works and plein-air sketches, Johan Christian Dahl’s large, naturalistic landscapes were considered by his contemporaries to be his major artistic achievement. This work was painted in difficult conditions, at Engelholm, a windswept coastal town on the north west coast of the Scania peninsular, Sweden, a short boat trip from Elsinore.

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Naturalism in Germany and northern Europe showed a similar tendency to revise Dutch seventeenth-century patterns, infusing them with the vividness that came from making studies outdoors. The most prominent naturalistic artist in central Germany was the Norwegian Johann Christian Clausen Dahl. Dahl studied at the Copenhagen Academy and then, in 1820, went to Dresden, where he became a close friend of Caspar David Friedrich, sharing a house with him. Dahl adopted much of Friedrich’s dramatic imagery, but he worked in an increasingly naturalistic style and even encouraged Friedrich for a time to work outdoors. His pictures have a freshness which brought him considerably popularity in his own lifetime.

Dahl came from Bergen in Norway. He visited Dresden in 1818 at the end of his student days in Copenhagen as part of a lengthier tour, which ended with him taking up residence in the city on the Elbe. He became the second great master of the Romantic landscape movement in Dresden beside Caspar David Friedrich.

Dahl’s nocturnal panorama of the famous buildings on the Elbe captures the unique atmosphere of Dresden, the artistic and royal capital, in a most striking manner. This painting, which numbers among Dahl’s most famous works, must be seen as a homage to the genius loci of the city he had adopted many years earlier.

The view is seen from the same place at the right at the right bank of the river from where Bernardo Bellotto’s view (also in the Gemäldegalerie) was taken.

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