Frederic Edwin Church – The Icebergs (1861)

Description

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Frederic Edwin Church – The Icebergs (1861)

“Church painted The Icebergs at a time of general interest in Arctic exploration. The disappearance of the expedition of British explorer John Franklin, who had planned to navigate the Northwest Passage, was a popular press topic in the 1850s. In 1856 the American explorer Elisha Kane published an account of his own expedition to determine Franklin’s fate. Francis Leopold McClintock finally uncovered the fate of Franklin and his crew, which he described in an 1859 book. Church too was interested in the Arctic, and in science and geography.

He was a member of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, where the Arctic explorer Isaac Israel Hayes had lectured, and in 1859 he journeyed to the Arctic himself. Hayes, a friend of Church, named an Arctic peak at the Kennedy Channel after Church in the summer of 1861. As Church scholar David C. Huntington wrote, “By going north in 1859 Church was both following and leading the public mind…. Church had a democratic genius for embodying the archetype of the immediate and immediately present. His artistic hand responded to the moment’s aggregate curiosity.”

In June 1859, Church and his friend the writer Louis Legrand Noble took a steamship from Halifax, Nova Scotia to St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. For about a month they traveled in the area of Cape Race and along the Avalon Peninsula. They chartered a schooner to approach the sea ice, and Church used a rowboat to get close to the icebergs, making sketches in pencil and oil while enduring sea-sickness.

He produced about one hundred sketches, ranging from small pencil drawings to atmospheric oil studies. Returning to New York, he painted Twilight in the Wilderness (1860) before committing to The Icebergs, which took about six months, in the winter of 1860. Church was then at the height of his fame, and newspapers regularly updated the public on the progress of the painting. Noble documented their voyage in his book After Icebergs with a Painter, which was published to coincide with the exhibition of The Icebergs.

Church produced a number of advanced studies as he searched for the most favorable composition, relying on intuition. A landscape depicting just ice, water, and sky was unconventional and its composition a “hazardous experiment”, according to his contemporary, the writer Henry Tuckerman, with “little scope for general effect”. Church told his agent that he was pleased with the canvas as he neared completion.

Shortly before the first exhibition, the American Civil War began. Church decided to call the painting The North, a title with a double meaning: a picture of the Arctic and a patriotic reference to the northern Union. Advertisements for the exhibition noted that the admission proceeds would be donated to the Patriotic Fund, which supported Union soldiers’ families.”

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