J.C. Dahl visits Hellefossen in 1826

"On the 5th, the journey from Drammen to Kongsberg continued."

On this tour we made a small detour at Hogsund to Hellefos, the well-known salmon fishery, which also forms an interesting prospect, which the Professor sketched from 2nd place, while I, as time and ability allowed, made a draft. The person who wrote this in his diary from "Travel through a Part of Bergen and Trondheim" on July 5, 1826, was the 35-year-old officer Mathias Wilhelm Eckhoff. The traveling companion, whom he refers to as "the Professor", was none other than the painter JCDahl. Barely 40 years old, Dahl was on his way to becoming one of Norway's most famous painters, with an education in Copenhagen and Dresden and study time in Italy, where he had learned to paint classical ruins and landscapes. But it was on this trip in the summer of 1826 that JCDahl seriously began to paint Norwegian nature and thus initiated the national romanticism in Norwegian painting. One of the first stops on the journey was Hellefossen, and the result of the sketch he made there was the well-known painting "Hellefossen" that hangs in the National Gallery. He did not complete it until several years later, in 1838.