Cloud Study with Horizon

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.