Landscape with a Big Tree 1814

Curator: Let's turn our attention to Johan Christian Dahl's "Landscape with a Big Tree," painted around 1814. It is just so...understated. Editor: Mmm, and yet the tree feels so incredibly majestic! A solitary figure walks away in the opposite direction and it gives it the sensation of total isolation... What’s this painted in? Oil on canvas, right? Curator: That’s it. You’ve touched on a key aspect. He did many "plein-air" watercolors. Oil was a newer format he began testing after finding watercolor limiting. And Dahl was one of the early romantics; he found these solitary landscapes intensely personal. It has a touch of the sublime to me. Editor: Interesting... I am focusing on the social context, wondering about access to these materials in 1814 and whether it was painted en plein air, then you consider it limiting. There's a whole network of labor to extract, refine, manufacture, distribute—we never see those hands. What sort of brushes, pigments, and cloth? Those natural materials are hardly "neutral," carrying colonial histories of resource extraction. Curator: True, so true. These early landscapes are laden with all those histories. His rendering of light feels so utterly free, unburdened by gravity! It really carries me back. His later paintings don't hold that spark for me. It might have been due to being in nature as opposed to in studio, perhaps. Editor: It is a curious balancing act, capturing immediacy in the finished oil medium while processing industrial scale extraction processes. Maybe later he focused in studio and worked in less challenging environment and the magic was gone. The labor becomes too estranged! Curator: Maybe! He captured so powerfully his first impression of the scenery here in that small figure with the huge, old tree dominating it, as if on its own stage... I am thinking it reminds him, perhaps, of someone walking off into a new and terrifying war, but it could also be his way of embracing new artistic opportunities. Editor: Well, next time you are communing with nature, think about that canvas that lets it appear that the nature does not need us. Anyway, that’s enough for today, I think. Curator: Wonderful! Let’s leave this artwork for visitors to continue discovering their own nature and new materials within!