As we enter 2026, it will be 200 years since some of the first sketches of Urnes Stave Church were made; as the earliest reproduced images I have found of what has since become an iconic UNESCO world heritage site.

I’m happy to share that my article about the rediscovery of these sketches from the archive has now been published with the journal Kunst & Kultur, hosted by Scandinavian University Press in collaboration with Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design. A big thanks to Bente Aass Solbakken for enabling and supporting this, to the anonymous peer reviewers for helping improve the draft and to the archive team at Astrup Fearnley Museet for allowing me access to the source material.

Below is Thomas Fearnley’s watercolour from July 28, 1826, as the very first known sketch made of the church. Histories of the church have often previously begun with the images from J.C. Dahl’s folio from 1837, to which this article provides a microhistorical prologue. It discusses the circumstances of a source’s emergence under the particularities of the terms ‘provenance’ and ‘provenience’. The research formed part of my PhD ‘Portal Propagations’, and the research project ‘Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity’, located at the The Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

Read and download the article here: https://www.scup.com/doi/10.18261/kk.108.3-4.3