Artist who loved moonlight gets his day in the sun

Johan Christian Dahl, a Norwegian artist with a taste for moonlight and shipwrecks, used to be known only to the cognoscenti of the British art world.

But as a triumphant exhibition captivates audiences in the Midlands, the 19th-century painter is proving even more popular than Britain's great Romantic, JMW Turner. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham last month opened a show built around its tiny, recently acquired masterpiece, Mother and Child by the Sea, 1840, one of only two works by JC Dahl in Britain. And a combination of fine reviews and clever marketing has produced even more visitors than the gallery's previous record, set two years ago by its exhibition of JMW Turner's early seascapes.

Moonrise over Europe: JC Dahl and Romantic Landscape has been attracting an average of 239 visits a day, a figure the gallery described as "unprecedentedly high". Two years ago, The Sun Rising through Vapour: Turner's Early Seascapes secured a slightly lower attendance.

Paul Spencer-Longhurst, senior curator, said they were delighted that Dahl, a top-ranking Romantic in his own right, was proving as popular as the great acknowledged landscape painters of the 19th century. "If I'm honest, I'm surprised but also gratified. It's good that we can give Dahl the status he deserves," he said. "He is a household name in Norway, but not in Britain by any means."

Dahl was born in Bergen in 1788 when it was "virtually an overgrown fishing village," Dr Spencer-Longhurst said. His talent was recognised from an early age, but there was no money for art in an area still depressed after the Napoleonic wars. Local merchants paid for him to go to Copenhagen, where he worked with a carpenter and scenery painter in what he called "seven years of servitude". He then went on to Dresden, where he met fellow Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich, and where he lived for nearly all his life. He died in 1857.

The Barber Institute has borrowed a number of works from Norway to complement their own highly atmospheric gem. And the exhibition also includes work by his predecessors and contemporaries including Friedrich himself.