Evening near Dresden, Poplars in the Foreground

By the time he executed the present painting, Johann Christian Clausen Dahl had long since departed his native Norway to travel the Continent. He ultimately settled in Dresden in 1824, where he accepted a post at the Academy and taught an illustrious generation of painters that included his fellow Norwegians Thomas Fearnley and Peder Balke as well as the German landscapist Christian Friedrich Gille. It was also during this period that Dahl’s work shifted almost entirely to landscape painting, often, as here, Romantic depictions of Dresden and its environs. Marie Lødrup Bang notes that Dahl’s late views of Dresden are conceived as Stimmungslandschaften in which the topography is deemphasized to highlight the complex plays of light and shadow (M. L. Bang, Johan Christian Dahl, Life and Works, II, Oslo, 1987, pp. 67-68), as is brilliantly demonstrated in the present work. The foreground of poplars and other treetops serve as a frame to draw the viewer's attention to the beautifully modulated light in the sky, where passages of free and fluid brushwork alternate between dark scudding clouds and warm sunset tones breaking through from behind. To define the distant landscape, the artist uses the inverse of this technique, overlaying the blue tones delineating the topography with the warm colors from the sky to emphasize the reflection of the sunset light within the loosely rendered features of the landscape.