Two men stand at a precipice beside towering spruce trees. They look across a gorge toward a majestic waterfall, having paused together to contemplate this untamed scenery at sunset. The figure on the left, shown wearing a top hat and overcoat, is most likely a self-portrait by Dahl. The man to his right, though depicted from behind—a
Rückenfigur in German—is the painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), identifiable by his old-German style hat and cape. In 1823, the year this painting was made, Dahl moved into an apartment at number 33 An der Elbe in the city of Dresden, capital of the east German state of Saxony, becoming Friedrich’s upstairs neighbor. They had been friends since immediately after Dahl’s arrival in Dresden in 1818.[1] Until that point, Dahl, a native of Norway, was based in Copenhagen, where he trained for seven years at the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Art.[2]
Two Men before a Waterfall at Sunset recasts a painting of 1819 by Friedrich,
Two Men Contemplating the Moon, now in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden (see fig. 1 above). Dahl owned the painting by Friedrich, having received it in exchange for one of his own.[3] (There are two versions, one datable about 1824, in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and another, of about 1825–30, in The Met,
2000.51). In
Two Men Contemplating the Moon, Friedrich depicted himself seen from behind with his friend and disciple August Heinrich (1794–1822). The three artists were fond of one another, as reflected in statements made by Dahl. On February 17, 1819, he wrote: “called on the landscape painter Heinrich, who has recently started to paint in oil. His work pleased me enormously, from this man one can expect something.”[4] (
At the Edge of the Forest, one of five known oils by Heinrich, is in The Met's collection [
2008.6]) In an undated manuscript, Dahl wrote that he saw in Friedrich’s landscapes “the fundamental idea of a deep, high art—yes, they are like dream pictures from an unknown world.”[5] By including his own likeness in the present work, Dahl testified to his friendship with Friedrich shortly after Heinrich’s premature death at the age of twenty-eight.
When an artist places figures seen from the back within a landscape painting, the viewer is put in the position of seeing what they see, reinforcing the viewer’s own relationship to nature. One attribute of the Romantic period was the notion that the contemplation of nature afforded a sense of deep communion with the cosmos, which the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) described as a connection with “the holy fire which animates all Nature.”[6] Dahl had already employed
Rückenfiguren, adopted from Friedrich, in his paintings, but his general approach to composition was fundamentally different from Friedrich’s.[7] Whereas Friedrich tended to compose his prospects around a central axis—
Two Men Contemplating the Moon is somewhat exceptional in this regard—perspectival recession in Dahl’s pictures is characteristically based on a diagonal. In
Two Men before a Waterfall at Sunset, the diagonal commences with the pair of figures at the lower left and continues toward the setting sun, obscured by the dense screen of trees.
One obvious difference between Friedrich’s picture and Dahl’s is their respective landscape settings. Based on Dahl’s written statements from the period and those by contemporaries who may have commented on the picture, it is unclear what source the artist used for the scenery. While reminiscent of the Sächsische Schweiz region south of Dresden and the Riesengebirge, east of the city, the source may be someplace farther afield (see Bang 1987). What is clear is that the wildness of the terrain evokes what had long been thought of in the realm of painting as a “Norwegian” landscape, a type pioneered by seventeenth-century Dutch artists Allart van Everdingen and Jacob van Ruisdael, whose works could be seen in public and private collections throughout Europe. As early as 1812, Dahl wrote: “The landscape painters I try to learn from are Ruisdael and Everdingen.”[8] Dahl was explicitly identified with them soon after he began to gain a reputation in Dresden.[9]
Dahl’s predilection for old master models, for the scenery of his native country, and for naturalistic details are hallmarks of his work. Yet the painting was not intended to be a topographically accurate description of a specific place. Instead, what is paramount in this work is the relationship of the figures to their surroundings, that is, the mood or feeling they convey. This type of landscape is known in German as a
Stimmungslandschaft, and it is this aspect of the painting that underlies Dahl’s connection to Friedrich and to the wider circle of Romantic landscape painters in and around Dresden, including not only August Heinrich but such figures as Carl Gustav Carus (see, for example, The Met
2007.192 and
2018.749) and Julius von Leypold (see, for example, The Met
2008.7).
Dahl sold this painting to Dr. Christian Gottfried Hillig (1777–1844), a lawyer in Leipzig, by January 1824. Hillig began to acquire paintings by Friedrich as early as 1813, and his impressive collection eventually included at least three of them. Perhaps, then, Friedrich was the connection between Hillig and Dahl. This was Hillig's only painting by Dahl.[10]
Bang (1987) describes three related drawings, including a study for the man in old-style German costume, dated and inscribed “Graf von Harro von Nordfriesland, Dresden d. 21 Decbr. 1819” (private collection, Bergen, in 1987); a study for the man leaning against the rock, dated “d. 4 Martz 1820,” which was also used for other paintings of the period (Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo, inv. B 1652; see n. 6); and a
ricordo, which is signed, dated, and inscribed “1824. Nach Leipzig – An Dr. Hillig / Dahl f.” (KODE Art Museums, Bergen, inv. 346, LV. 150).
Asher Miller 2019
[1] See Bang 1987, vol. 1, esp. pp. 39–42, 73–83.
[2] Norway and Denmark were united politically until 1814, when Norway was obliged to accept Swedish sovereignty.
[3] The picture by Dahl is
River in the Plauenscher Grund, 1820, KODE Museums, Bergen, inv. BB. 146. The trade seems to have occurred by April 1820; see Bang 1987, vol. 2, pp. 94–95, no. 197, vol. 3, pl. 88.
[4] Quoted in Bang 1987, vol. 1, p. 41. Thirty-eight drawings by Heinrich, purchased from Heinrich’s estate by Dahl, are in the Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo; see Sabine Rewald, “August Heinrich: Poet of Loschwitz Cemetery,”
Master Drawings 39 (summer 2001), pp. 143ff.
[5] Quoted in Bang 1987, vol. 1, pp. 83, 255.
[6] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774, trans. Victor Lange, New York, 1949.
[7] See Bang 1987, under References, as well as nos. 185, 1176, 1215. For an expanded discussion of the group to which the latter two relate, see also Petra Kulman-Hodick in the catalogue for Dresden-Oslo 2014–15, pp. 102–5.
[8] Letter to Lyder Sagen, Copenhagen, June 13, 1812, quoted in Bang 1987, vol. 1, p. 232.
[9] W. C. Müller,
Künstblatt, no. 19 (1819), p. 73, quoted in Bang 1987, vol. 1, pp. 41, 191 n. 5, and see p. 263.
[10] All four paintings were included in Hillig’s estate sale (see provenance). The Friedrichs are catalogued in Helmut Börsch-Supan and Karl Wilhelm Jähnig,
Caspar David Friedrich: Gemälde, Druckgraphik und bildmäßige Zeichnungen, Munich, 1973, as
Landscape with Garden Party (no. 200, whereabouts unknown),
Ship in Full Sail on the High Seas (no. 216, private collection, Hamburg), and
Pine Forest with a Rising Moon (no. 273, whereabouts unknown). On Hillig, see Herrmann Zschoche,
Caspar David Friedrich: Die Briefe, Hamburg, 2006, p. 78. Börsch-Supan and Jähnig included
Elbe Landscape, also known as
Flat Landscape or
Evening Landscape in the Riesengebirge (no. 272, Kulturhistorisches Museum, Stralsund) among the works in Hillig's estate sale as well, tentatively assigning it as no. 9 in the 1862 Hillig sale catalogue, but, according to the curator at the Stralsund museum, the painting most likely was not a part of the Hillig collection and entered their collection as a gift from the widow Odebrecht in Greifswald in 1858 (whereas the catalogue raisonné includes the widow in the provenance for the picture, but places her ownership after Hillig, stating that it was acquired by the museum from her with no specificity of date beyond "before 1895").
