Johan Christian Clausen Dahl
waterfall in Norway, 1852

Artist
Johan Christian Clausen Dahl

Title
waterfall in Norway

Year of creation
1852

Technique and dimensions
oil on paper, 20.1 x 23.6 cm

Year of acquisition
2009

On the right, a waterfall shoots down from the high rock covered with seemingly tiny wooden houses. These buildings really illustrate the scale of this thunderous natural spectacle. The white spray lying in the air becomes the visual center of the picture, light, roaring and untamed. But the water then flows, quickly calming down, with the turquoise river into the depths of the picture, which after a short distance flashes again, now through rapids, with sprayy white. A narrow strip of sky rises above the barren, wide and mountainous landscape, which varies in color from violet to yellowish tones and offers a similar symphony of colors as the foreground of the small-format and yet almost monumental picture.

Farewells have to be sweetened, and so this work by Johan Christian Dahl, acquired through the Association of Friends of the National Gallery, will henceforth be a pleasant reminder of the fact that the author of these lines left his place of work in the National Gallery on New Year's Eve 2009 in 2010 after a good 23 years left in favor of new tasks in Dresden. Such a significant and trend-setting new acquisition parallel to a departure from museum service is perhaps not a given, but it was allowed to appear desired here with meaning and insight, and it was achieved in the most beautiful, generous and memorable way, with the art dealer Le Claire for its courtesy and Above all, the Association of Friends of the National Gallery should be thanked for its commitment. [1] So this short text can now also be understood as an express warm thank you from the author to the association, its board and its chairwoman Christina Weiß, who expressly and warmly supported this purchase, and to the director of the Nationalgalerie, Udo Kittelmann, to whom the author would like to express his thanks at this point for a good year of cooperation.

Johan Christian Dahl is no stranger, even if he may not be as familiar to German audiences as some of his contemporaries. He moved from Norway to Dresden at an early age, where he worked in a highly cultivated school of landscape painting, in the environment of Caspar David Friedrich, the transcendentalist, and Carl Gustav Carus, the universalist. Dahl became one of the central figures in German landscape painting between classicism and Biedermeier, between romanticism and realism and became perhaps the most earthbound, realistic landscape artist of his time. His imagery mostly moved between his Norwegian homeland, German mountains and islands near the Baltic Sea, but he also loved to "paint air" [2], as he himself once wrote, i.e. clouds and sky. His theme was not the idyllic south of Italian glistening light and beautiful Antiquità, as we know it from Blechen, but rather the German landscape with melancholy elements in the spirit of the pictures of Ruisdael and Everdingen on the one hand, and the reality-saturated depiction of nature in the tradition of the French landscape painter Henri de Valenciennes' on the other hand. Dahl was a German artist in his place of work and a European in his thinking. It is precisely this ambivalence that makes his art doubly remarkable. He also worked in an academic and school-appropriate manner, on the one hand, because this enabled him to supply the picture market, and on the other hand, in a courageous, authentic and very picturesque manner.

The now acquired study of the Norwegian waterfall is based on one of the trips the artist took to his former homeland; it is - cum grano salis - an image of homesickness. This picture now offers the ideal complement to the picture of a Scandinavian fjord that already exists in the National Gallery and to Dahl's cloud studies that have survived in the old collection: on the one hand, the resting water stretching out as a lake and, on the other hand, the water vapor moving as clouds in the sky two appearances, which are now joined by the waterfall as a rushing, roaring, wildly flowing appearance of this natural element.

The acquisition was preceded by careful research into the provenance, which was carried out to a considerable extent and with the necessary inconspicuousness and haste by Dr. Petra Winter, the provenance researcher at the State Museums in the Central Archives, for which I would like to thank her very much. Such origin checks, which have become increasingly important for new acquisitions in recent years, sometimes prove to be complex and complicated, but have become indispensable. However, the famous pianist Wilhelm Kempf can be named as the previous owner, who in turn made several trips to Scandinavia in the years before the First World War and who painted the picture at this time (when 19th century painting was still relatively low in value ) must have acquired, the origin can be considered unproblematic.

But this provenance also has another aspect to offer. A pianist as celebrated and world-famous as Kempf, who would certainly have had countless works of art available for purchase, obviously chose this work not only because of the undeniable painterly charms that result from the dappled brush structures and the eminently fresh oil paint, but also for another reason: As a musician, he must have been fascinated by the fact that this image - to put it with Wilhelm Busch - was "connected with noise": for the musician, the sound of wild nature was obviously another, an alternative acoustic phenomenon to music, a rushing recreational area, so to speak . Because you certainly shouldn't dismiss it as just a coincidence that the world-traveling musician wanted to surround himself with such a powerful image...

Dahl painted this ravishingly vital, completely authentic-looking study on paper. It was created in Dresden, long after returning from Norway. It should be understood as a travel reminiscence, as a late echo of happy memories of the homeland, but also as a vital small-format alternative to the many heroic-academic landscape paintings that were created around the middle of the 19th century. Dahl's confession of his homeland in Norway, painted in Dresden as a reminiscence, impresses with its naturalness and truthfulness.

Bernhard Maaz


[1] Johan Christian Dahl. Ten oil sketches, cat. Thomas Le Claire, Hamburg 2009, No. 10 (oS).

[2] Quoted from Herwig Guratzsch (ed.): Johan Christian Dahl. Clouds Waves Wehmut, Schleswig/Munich 2002, p. 183.