JOHAN CHRISTIAN CLAUSEN DAHL (BERGEN 1788-1857 DRESDEN)

The present work was painted only a few years after Dahl’s move in 1811 to Denmark to study at the Academy in Copenhagen. Born into a family of modest means in his native Norway, and without a national Academy to train artists in his home country, Dahl’s travel and schooling were financed by a group of well-to-do local citizens who noticed the young artist’s talent. His time at the Danish Academy was foundational for Dahl, as were trips to the countryside around Copenhagen, and his experience seeing works in the Danish royal collection firsthand. The collection’s particular strength was in works from the Dutch Golden Age, and Jacob van Ruisdael and Albert van Everdingen were important early influences on the young artist.

Depicting Lake Esrum, Denmark’s largest lake, in the countryside north of Copenhagen, the present painting is a wonderful early example of the kind of moonlight scenes that Dahl would become famous for later in his career. Dahl himself was particularly pleased with this work, writing in a letter that it had ‘a tranquility and calm…which lends it a serenity and beauty….’ Though the artist would not meet the great German painter Caspar David Friedrich until several years later, the foundation of their shared Romantic vocabulary of moonlit scenes was already well-established in Dahl’s oeuvre.