DAHL, JOHANN CHRISTIAN CLAUSEN1788 Bergen - 1857 Dresden


Title: "Larvik im Mondschein".
Date: Ca. 1840.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Mounting: Laid on fibreboard.
Measurement: 22.5 x 36.5cm.
Frame: Framed.
Certificate:
Helmut Börsch-Supan, Berlin 2007.

Cf. Literature:
M. Lodrup Bang: Johann Christian Dahl 1788-1857. Life and Works. Oslo 1987, vol. 2, cat. rais. no. 877.

Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany.

The painter of this work has captured the magical light of a Scandinavian summer night with a full moon. When the Norwegian-born Johan Christian Dahl (also J.C. Clausen Dahl) painted this view of the southern Norwegian port of Larvik, he had already been living in Dresden for at least 16 years. The son of a fisherman and ferryman, he had created a fabulous career as an artist thanks to his remarkable talent. His studies in Copenhagen had been financed by donations, but his art had opened up the world to him. At the invitation of the Danish crown prince, he was able to travel to Italy and from 1824 he was a professor at the Dresden Art Academy. In Dresden, Dahl lived in the same house as his friend and colleague, Caspar David Friedrich, who was 14 years his senior. During his lifetime, the Norwegian became more commercially successful than Friedrich and is today regarded as the most important Norwegian landscape painter and Romantic.

The atmosphere of nightly twilight, which is heightened by the moonlight reflected on the calm surface of the sea, was first captured on paper as a drawing by the artist during a trip to his homeland in 1834. A few years later, this drawing served as the basis for an atmospheric and large-format night piece. Immediately after the first public presentation, during the Leipzig Easter Fair in 1839, this large painting was proposed for the decoration of the royal palace in Kristiania. In the end, however, it went straight to the collection of the Norwegian National Gallery, that had been co-founded by Johan Christian Dahl, where it can still be found today. The painting therefore did not remain in Dresden long enough to have served as a model for Dahl's students to copy. Thus, in 2007, Helmut Börsch-Supan came to the conclusion in his certificate on the present painting that it is a work created by Johan Christian Dahl himself, albeit unsigned.
Whether this painting represents an intermediate stage in the development towards the large painting in the National Gallery in Oslo or whether it is a later variation on the theme remains unknown.