Johan Christian Clausen Dahl Bergen 1788-1857 Dresden

In the early nineteenth century Dresden was a center of artistic invention and a magnet for painters from all over northern Europe.  Johan Christian Dahl, a Norwegian by birth, was drawn to the city and spent most of his career there.  He had begun his training as an apprentice to a house painter, in Bergen, but was quickly recognized as having exceptional talent and sent by a group of Bergen citizens to train at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.  In 1818 he left Copenhagen to begin his Grand Tour of Europe.  Dahl started in Germany and stayed in Dresden for nearly two years, finally setting off  for Italy, which had been his original destination, in 1820.  There he spent time in Naples and in Rome, studying and making numerous rapid oil sketches after nature.  He returned to Dresden in July 1821 and  quickly settled into the artists' community there.  He remained in the city for the rest of his life, apart from short trips back to Norway.

In this richly colored painting, which he executed shortly after his return from Italy, Dahl depicts the banks of the Elbe at sunset, with the city of Dresden in the distance.  It is taken from downstream on the right bank of the Elbe, with the dome of the Frauenkirche rising over the Augustus-Brücke, the bridge connecting the Old City with the New.  To the right are the steeples of the Catholic church and the tower of Dresden Castle.  Although Dahl himself rarely painted Dresden from downstream, it is a popular view of the city, familiar from Bellotto's famous painting in Dresden and a number of contemporary 19th century engravings.

What most distinguishes Dahl's view is the combination of romantic and naturalistic elements in the work.  While the intense coloring of the clouds and sky may owe something to his German contemporaries, they also reflect his studies in Italy; and the detailed and realistic depiction of the foreground betrays his early training in Denmark.  It is characteristic of Dahl that the figures loading a small boat in the foreground or those further along the shore are not symbolic or idealized but real people engaged in ordinary activities.

The View of Dresden from the Road to Meissen  is Dahl's earliest extant painting of the city.  Although he made nearly 40 views of Dresden, the works of the 1820s have disappeared.  In her 1987 monograph on Dahl, Marie Lødrup Bang cites a lost painting from this period (Bang 189).¹  She associates the missing work with a group of paintings now all lost.²  Two are mentioned by Dahl himself, in his notebooks and diaries, and are recorded in his Liber Veritatis, his drawn record of his paintings, now in the Bergen Art Museum.³  They were commissions for a Mr. Preusch in Dresden, and a Mr. Elliot in Boston, executed in 1820 and 1822.  One drawing from the Liber Veritatas, which Dahl's inscription identifies it with the paintings for Preusch and Eliot, is very close to the present work (fig. 1). It is taken from the same viewpoint,  with the banks of the river clearly visible and the curving shore in front.  However, the foreground details are different:    the boat and the figures loading her are not in the painting, and the shoreline is more even and regular, without the many small curves and inlets of the present work.  The other (fig. 2), which Dahl's inscription identifies it as a pendant to Eliot's , shows Dresden from a different viewpoint, but with a simplified version of the foreground boat  (and possibly the attendant figures) and an irregular shoreline.   It is tempting to see the present painting as a melding of the compositions, combining their most striking elements, or it could even be the lost View from the Road to Meissen painted for Mr. Eliot.

We are grateful to Marie Lødrup Bang for her assistance in cataloguing this painting.

1  Marie Lødrup Bang, Johan Christian Dahl 1788-1857, Life and Works, Oslo 1987, vol. 2, cat. no. 189, pp. 91-92.
2  Ibid.
3  Bang, Loc. cit. and  vol. 2, cat. nos. 377-78, pp. 136 and 137 cites Dahl's notes and transcribes the inscriptions on the drawings.  However, her cat. nos. 377 and 378 refer to lost paintings while the illustrations,  vol. 3, pls. 152 and 153, reproduce the two Liber Veritatis drawings now in the Bergen Museum.