The Minister Laestadius teaching Laplanders

The influential preacher Laestadius, dressed in a big fur coat and a top hat, preaches to a group of Sami people. The landscape is very snowy. Tents in the background.

Biard was a French painter who traveled with different expeditions to exotic locations like the Northern Scandinavia and Svalbard, and also the Amazon. He often painted dramatic scenes from these expeditions and used his imagination to make the paintings seem more exotic. This painting shows the several Sami tents buried in snow with paths between them when in real life the tens were never set up like this, buried in snow. Lestadius was the founder of Laestadianism, a pietistic, Lutheran movement that still is active in northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.