New! Chapel on the Edge of the Wood – Karl Lessing – Beautiful Catholic Art

Doesn't this look like a wonderful place to be? A dream place to pilgrim to and worship there. We have a beautiful church on the top of a high hill on a beautiful summer day, and the faithful are filing in for Mass.

The artist Lessing may have been painting an actual church; he often did, although we can’t find any source as to which church this might have been. It might have simply been in his Romantic imagination. He put a beautiful chapel in a remote, rugged landscape, which Romantic painters would sometimes do. They were spiritually colonizing the wilderness, placing Catholic meaning into nature. The idea that a lot of us have about nature being a restorative place was, according to a professor of mine back in the day, an idea started with Wordsworth returning from Tintern Abbey and widely held by the Romantics. Prior to that the wilderness was wild, like it is in the Old Testament, a place of desolation and evil spirits.

Carl Friedrich Lessing (1808–1880) has a lot of really cool paintings with Catholic themes. We carry several in our shop right now, some of my personal favorites in the collection so far. He had studied architecture from age 14 to age 18, when he had some success as a painter, and he then switched to art. He became a major painter, trying to put meaning into landscapes instead of just making them pretty, and painting historical pictures with big narratives. His style seems so clean and perfect to me.

He painted this in 1839. This painting is super similar to a painting in our shop called "Chapel on a Mountain in Winter" by Ernst Ferdinand Oehme. That painting features a beautiful chapel at the crown of a hill, only it's set in winter, not summer. That one was painted in 1842, and we can assure you, these guys, both German Romantic painters, were paying attention to each other's work. The German title of this one is Die Waldkapelle which can be translated as Forest Chapel. Original oil on canvas. 48 cm (18.8 in) by 63 cm (24.8 in). It is currently currently housed at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. (source: staedelmuseum.de)

** IMPORTANT ** THE IMAGE IS SMALLER THAN THE PAPER! There is a blank border around the image. Approximately 0.5" wide for 5x7, 1.3" for 8.5x11, 1.6" for 11x14, and 1.75" for 13x17 and 16x20. For the two poster sizes, 18x24 and 24x36, we use 0.5" borders. We do this because the ratio of the rectangle of the art almost never matches the rectangle of the paper, and if it did happen to match one size, it would not match the others. Most fine art printers do this because otherwise they’d have to crop the art or warp it to make it fit the paper. The border looks good. It gives the picture a faux matted appearance.

There is almost always a little more border either on the left-right sides, or the top-bottom, depending on whether the ratio of the art is wider or taller than the paper.

We make Archival Quality fine art prints:

– Acid-free paper

– Archival pigments

– Cardboard backer for sizes 11x14 and less.

– Above story of the art

– Enclosed in a tight-fitting, crystal-clear bag.

– Rated to last 200+ years without fading if kept dry and out of the direct sun.

Thanks for your interest!

+JMJ+

Sue & John

Lincoln, Nebraska

“In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church needs art.”

~ St. Pope John Paul II

Original image is out-of-copyright. Descriptive text and any image alterations (hence the whole new image) © by www.CatholicArtAndJewelry.com.