Interior of the Cathedral of Amiens

Interior of the Cathedral of Amiens is an oil painting on canvas by the Belgian architectural painter Jules Victor Génisson, dated 1842 and displayed in the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil.

Génisson was born in Saint-Omer in northern France in 1805 and trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp under the brothers Mathieu-Ignace and Philippe-Jacques van Bree; in 1835 he married Reine Van Bree, a daughter of his teacher. After study trips through France, Italy, Germany and Britain between 1829 and 1834 he lived in the Brussels area and then in Leuven, where he taught the view painter Joseph Maswiens, before settling in Bruges, where he died in 1860. Although he also painted portraits and history scenes, he made his name with precise interiors of large churches, usually Gothic, a choice in step with the revival of interest in Gothic architecture in his time. He was one of relatively few Belgian painters to specialise in the genre.

The cathedral of Notre-Dame at Amiens was built almost entirely between 1220 and about 1270 and is the largest cathedral in France by interior volume. Génisson looks across the soaring arcades toward a great rose window filled with coloured glass, beneath rib vaults lit by tall clerestory windows. A tall, elaborately carved wooden structure crowned with statues stands against a pier on the right, statues stand on the pier at left, and sunlight falls across the patterned floor. Small figures of worshippers, a kneeling man, a mother with children and seated women give scale to the architecture and show the church in contemporary use.

In 1842, the year of this picture, Génisson sent two views of Amiens Cathedral to the Brussels Salon, one of them taken in the transept. He also exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1843 and 1850, and his works are now found in museums from Brussels and Antwerp to Dublin, Saint Petersburg and São Paulo.