Forest Fire

In 1846 Johan Christian Dahl was in his late fifties and had taught at the Dresden academy for more than 20 years, and he still made small studies like this one. It is painted on a sheet of paper, later mounted on cardboard, about 27 centimetres wide, and at the lower left he set his linked initials JCD and the year. Light and weather had held his attention ever since his year in Italy in 1820 and 1821, when he made many fresh studies around the Bay of Naples, and a few years later he painted Vesuvius in eruption. Here his subject is a fire in a forest. The study belongs to the Christoph Heilmann Foundation, a private collection of early 19th-century landscape painting, which has lent it to the Lenbachhaus.