Johan Christian Dahl - Copenhagen Harbor by Moonlight, 1846

 

Johan Christian Dahl - Copenhagen Harbor by Moonlight, 1846
oil on canvas, 37 3/4 x 60 5/8 in. (95.9 x 154 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Since the early nineteenth-century, the waterfront ship and lumber yard depicted in this view has been known as Larsens Plads, or Larsen’s Place, after its founder, Lars Larsen. Dahl first painted this prospect in 1816 (Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg), but in reprising it for the present work he doubled the size of the canvas, omitting incidental details and heightening its atmospheric effect. This placid scene, conceived as the pendant to a far wilder, natural one, Tyrolean Landscape with a Waterfall (1823; private collection), remained unsold at the artist’s death. via