JOHAN CHRISTIAN DAHL | FARM ON A MOUNTAINSIDE

Mrs Stenersen (acquired from the artist via the Christiania Kunstforening in 1855)

J. L. Malthe (by 1888)

Sale: Bukowski, Stockholm, 10 October 1951, lot 78

Sale: Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner, Oslo, 21 November 2002, lot 19

Asbjorn Lunde, New York (purchased at the above sale; his estate until 2019. Lunde (1927-2017) was a collector, traveller and patron of the arts, and one of the greatest collectors of nineteenth-century Norwegian and Swiss paintings. He was born in Staten Island to Norwegian parents, graduated from Columbia University and went on to set up his own successful law firm in Manhattan. In 1968, he purchased his first two Norwegian paintings, which would eventually form the core of a much bigger collection, composed of several hundred objects including paintings, sculptures, prints and Indian miniatures. Throughout his long life, Asbjorn Lunde donated works to multiple museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the Newark Museum, New Jersey. Following an exhibition in 2011 of more than 50 works from his collection at the National Gallery in London, in 2016 Lunde donated two spectacular paintings to the museum: At Handeck (circa 1860) by Calame and The Lower Falls of the Labrofoss (1827) by Johan Christian Dahl.)

Marie Lødrup Bang, Johan Christian Dahl, Life and Works, Oslo, 1987, vol. II, p. 341, no. 1152, catalogued; vol. III, p. 495, no. 1152, catalogued & illustrated (as Farm on a Mountain Side and whereabouts unknown) 

Christiania (Oslo), Kunstforening; Bergen, Exercerhuset, Commemorative Exhibitions in Bergen and Christiania, 1888, no. 95 & possibly no. 100 (Bergen)

London, The National Gallery, Forest, Rocks, Torrents Norwegian and Swiss Landscape Paintings from the Lunde Collection, 2011, no. 19, illustrated in the catalogue

Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Sublime North: Romantic Painters Discover Norway Paintings from the Collection of Asbjørn Lunde, 2017­- 2018, ‘no catalogue’

Farm on a Mountain Side encapsulates the wild nordic views of untamed nature for which Dahl is best known. Although he settled permanently in Dresden after 1820, there establishing his international reputation, it was his love of the Norwegian landscape that fuelled his creative energies throughout his life. Returning to Norway on his travels, Dahl sketched incessantly in his notebooks, amassing a huge number of studies which he could then work up into oil paintings on his return to his Dresden studio. In his notes Dahl identified the present work as 'an imaginary landscape in the character of Voss', associating it with that region north-east of his home city of Bergen.

Marie Lødrup Bang notes that the present work may be the one mentioned by Norwegian art historian and critic Andreas Aubert in his account of the 1888 Kunstforening exhibition: 'Bold, broad impressive, beautiful. Building between big boulders...[?] A pine tree on a cliff, the cottage with smoke, people, goats, mountain - sunshine'

Waterfalls and rapids had been a favourite motif for Dahl over many years, both as an example of the phenomenon of nature and an expression of its awesome power. Marie Lødrup Bang explains such landscapes in the following terms: 'Dahl's tendency to maintain a certain distance from his subject - a certain time for reflection, as it were - imbues the scene with a calm dignity.' (Bang, vol. I, p. 150).