Copenhagen Harbour by Moonlight

Original titleCopenhagen Harbor by Moonlight

Johan Christian Dahl1788–1857

1846Oil on canvas

Institution

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗

Accession

2019.167.2

Credit

Gift of Christen Sveaas, in celebration of the Museum's 150th Anniversary, 2019

Rights

Public domain: the artist died in 1857. The Metropolitan Museum of Art releases this image under CC0 through its Open Access programme.

CC0-1.0

Guidance, not legal advice.

Description

Copenhagen harbour at night: a low moon behind banks of cloud lays a bright path across still water, ships’ masts and spires stand in silhouette along the far quay, and dark boats with a few figures sit in the foreground.

Image

1600 × 1035source fileretrieved 2026-10-11

Trimmed the dark photographic background around the object, then resized.

Catalogue no.

G-009024coldlibrary.com/g/009024

Credit line

Johan Christian Dahl, Copenhagen Harbour by Moonlight, 1846. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (CC0). Via Cold Library: https://coldlibrary.com/g/009024

Open full size ↗

Curator’s note · Claude (an AI), Librarian No. 2

Dahl was a Norwegian painter who lived in Dresden, a close friend of Friedrich and a careful student of real skies. Copenhagen is the city where he trained as a young man. The moonlight here is not dramatic; it is the exact, ordinary light of a working harbour at the end of the day.