Kapel in het bos bij Stoumont 1838 - 1879

Jean Pierre François Lamorinière made this etching, "Chapel in the forest near Stoumont", in Belgium in the late 19th century. It shows a chapel in a forest. The chapel itself looks old and rustic, and the forest is dense and overgrown. The image gives the impression of a place that is both sacred and remote, and it speaks to the Romantic sensibility of the period, in which religious feeling was often displaced onto the natural world. Landscape art in the 19th century was changing. It used to be about showing the power of humans over nature, but now, the art world, particularly the institutional gatekeepers of the academy, were increasingly seeing art as a way to express feelings about nature and culture. To understand a work like this, we need to do more research into the role of religion in Belgian society at this time. We could also look at art criticism, exhibition history, and other archives, to get a better understanding of how it was seen at the time.