This is the museum's strongest historical story, and the one closest to the years around 1814, when Norway got its constitution. A decorator's apprentice from Bergen goes to Copenhagen (1811) and then to Dresden (1818), moves into Caspar David Friedrich's house (1823), becomes a professor, and paints Norway from memory and sketches for the rest of his life. Room 043 hangs the two side by side.
Friedrich's Riesengebirge (1835) against Dahl's Stalheim (1842). The same house in Dresden and the same genre, seven years between the pictures. One empties the landscape until it is a thought; the other fills it until it is a nation. What did Dahl decide that Friedrich would not?
Small and silent. The museum's text says that the fishing nets "act as a fence between the viewer and the city", and that the church towers are mirror-reversed. Why would a painter reverse his own birthplace?
Small and silent. The picture came to the gallery in 1904 from the estate of Siegwald Dahl, and is one side of the pair below.
The rainbow "keeps the landscape in a firm grip". The drawings are from 1826; the painting came sixteen years later. Find the five things that could not have been seen from one spot. The picture came to the gallery as a gift in 1914; Dahl sold mostly to Germans.
The view towards Fimreite, where the battle for the crown was fought in 1184. A landscape as a history painting without figures.
Room 042. In room 041 hang the small, dated cloud studies (Drifting Clouds, 1 April 1835; Villa Malta, Rome, 22 June 1821). Dahl dated his sketches to the day. Compare the sketches' honesty with Stalheim's rhetoric.
Dahl's pupil, dead at 39 in Munich. There is a gigapixel scan of the picture.
The birch stood on a burial mound and was brought down by a storm in 1874. The picture outlived the tree.
Balke was also a pupil of Dahl, and the one who went the other way: few details and almost no colour. The museum's text points to the small group of people on the crag as a yardstick for the forces of nature. Balke is your bridge to the modern rooms, forty years early. Give him the full time.
The same Balke, at about the same time. Here the museum writes that you can see clearly how he put the paint on, "whether through brushes, palette knives, or even his fingers". The picture was on the Norwegian 1000-krone banknote from 1975 to 1987.
Room 041. Painted outdoors in England, in the same decade as Corot's study from Italy. Dahl's cloud studies belong with these, not with Stalheim.
Room 041. Painted outdoors in Italy, in the same decade as Constable's study from England.
Who looked at Stalheim in 1842, and where? Not in Norway: Dahl sold mostly to Germans, and the picture came to the gallery as a gift in 1914. What did a buyer in Dresden want a Norwegian fjord for? Then ask the reverse question for Oslo in 1914.
Read the museum's own texts on Dahl and Fearnley in rooms 041–043. They are unusually good.
Describe the pictures from memory, without looking at them, and record a voice note.