Johan Christian Dahl

For much of his life the man now called the father of Norwegian landscape painting lived nowhere near Norway. Johan Christian Dahl settled in Dresden, the art city of Saxony, and for years he shared a house with Caspar David Friedrich, the great German Romantic of lonely, spiritual landscapes. The two friends painted side by side, though Dahl's mountains are wetter, wilder and more weather-beaten than Friedrich's still ones.

Dahl kept painting his homeland from a distance and from memory, its deep fjords, drifting clouds and old timber farms, returning north on long study trips to fill his sketchbooks. Norway had almost no painting tradition of its own, and he more or less founded one.

He also noticed that Norway's medieval wooden stave churches, dark tarred buildings bristling with carved dragon-heads, were being pulled down. Dahl campaigned to save them and helped rescue the Vang church, whose timbers were shipped off and rebuilt abroad. He died in Dresden in 1857.