Johan Christian Dahl: Drawings

Norwegian Romantic painter Johan Christian Dahl (1774-1857) was a compulsive sketcher and made thousands of drawings. The National Museum of Norway has more than 1900 Dahl works in their online collection, most of them drawings, and this weekend I spent two happy hours perusing them.

The drawings vary from highly polished compositions to quick sketches like these. Many were done in Italy, others in Norway, Denmark or Germany.

The main subjects are ships, landscapes, and trees.

There are quite a few human figures, but almost always from the back; there can't be more than five faces in the whole collection. I guess he didn't like to draw faces.