The Icebergs is an 1861 landscape oil painting by American painter Frederic Edwin Church that was inspired by sketches created on a one-month voyage in 1859 to the North Atlantic around Newfoundland and Labrador. The painting measures 1.64 × 2.85 metres (5.4 × 9.4 ft).^[1]

Church's painting came at a time of general interest in Arctic exploration. The search for the mission of John Franklin had been a popular press topic, and explorer Elisha Kane published an account of the expedition to find him. Church was interested in science and geography; he was a member of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, where Isaac Israel Hayes, an Arctic explorer and friend of Church, had lectured. Hayes named a peak at the Kennedy Channel after Church in 1861.^[2]

Church, accompanied by his friend Louis Legrand Noble, took a steamship from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador in June 1859. They travelled in the area of Cape Race and along the Avalon Peninsula.^[3] They chartered a schooner to approach the sea ice, and Church used a rowboat to get close to icebergs to make sketches in pencil and oil while enduring sea-sickness. He produced about one hundred sketches, ranging from small studies in pencil to full renderings of sky, sea, and ice in oils. Returning to New York, he painted Twilight in the Wilderness (1860) before committing to The Icebergs in winter 1860.^[4] Noble documented their voyage in his book After Icebergs with a Painter, which was published to coincide with the exhibition of The Icebergs.

Shortly before the first exhibition, the Civil War began. Church decided to call the painting The North, a title with a double meaning: a picture of the north and a patriotic reference to the northern Union. Advertisements for the exhibition noted that the admission proceeds would be donated to the Union Patriotic Fund, which helped soldiers' families. Church was such a popular artist at this point that newspapers regularly apprised readers of the subject matter and progress of this, his next painting.^[5]

The painting was exhibited by itself to paying audiences in New York at Goupil's from April 24 to July 9, 1861, and at the Boston Athenæum the next year. The exhibition rooms were prepared theatrically, as The Heart of the Andes (1859) had been exhibited before it; the painting had a massive carved frame, and the room had emerald carpet and maroon divans and cloths over the walls.^[6]

The painting is another of Church's composite views, which combine numerous elements from sketches with the artist's imagination to convey the overall experience of the locale.^[7] A broadside (see Gallery) was prepared for the painting, which described the scene in largely objective terms. Given its lack of figurative language, it may have been written by Church himself, as opposed to Noble, for example, whose writing about Church's art had been so effusive.^[8] In orienting the viewer to a foreign landscape, it begins:

The spectator is supposed to be standing on the ice, in a bay of the berg. The several masses are parts of one immense berg. Imagine an amphitheatre, upon the lower steps of which you stand, and see the icy foreground at your feet, and gaze upon the surrounding masses, all uniting in one beneath the surface of the sea. To the left is overhanging, precipitous ice; to the right is a part of the supper surface of the berg. To that succeeds an inner gorge, running up between Alpine peaks. In front is the main portion of the berg, exhibiting ice-architecture in its vaster proportions. Thus the beholder has around him the manifold forms of the huge Greenland glacier after it has been launched upon the deep, and subjected, for a time, to the action of the elements—waves and currents, sunshine and storm.^[9]

The play of light is highly detailed, with the sun somewhere at left casting shadows in blues, purples, and pinks, and the ice and water interacting in complex reflections, especially by the grotto. The viewer's eye is less likely to move vertically, from foreground to background, as it would in most landscape paintings, than to zig-zag. The likely starting point, the ship's mast, seems to point to the boulder and grotto at right, which in turn is oriented toward the large iceberg that dominates the background. The boulder and ice in the area of the grotto are painted with impasto, while Church otherwise conceals his brushstrokes, as on the water. This relatively turbulent area with its variety of color creates a "material play between surface and depth".^[10]

Almost everything depicted in the painting is water in some form. The exception (excluding the mast, added later) is the boulder, resting on a shelf at right. It is a reminder that the iceberg once made contact with land, and a reference to the geological notions of the day, such as Louis Agassiz's theory of the ice age, and Charles Lyell's theory of "continental lift". The general topic of unusually placed ("erratic") boulders was a matter of significant debate at the time.^[11] Mitchell writes that "The Icebergs is an exultant tribute to time's slow changes. But ... the scientific ideas that informed The Icebergs have long since been discounted by geologists and forgotten by the public. As a consequence, [the painting's] association with the geological process is often overlooked."^[12]

Church's paintings were greatly anticipated, and for many reviewers The Icebergs was worth the wait. The New-York Daily Tribune called it "the most splendid work of art that has as yet been produced in this country.... It is an absolutely wonderful picture, a work of genius that illustrates the time and the country producing it."^[13] While The Icebergs was well received,^[14] some critics had difficulty relating to the painting. Some resorted to the imaginative: perhaps the cavern or grotto was the "haunt" of fairies, sirens, or mermaids.^[15] In its original form, as seen in the US, the ship's mast had not yet been painted in; thus the painting had no narrative possibility, while the landscape of ice was foreign. The Albion warned that "ordinary observers ... may perhaps experience some slight disappointment when they miss all familiar objects and find no trace whatever of human association ... no connecting link of any sort between themselves and the canvas."^[16] The New York World wrote, "We shall be surprised if those of acute sensibilities do not look upon it at first with a positive feeling of pain, akin to that which we sometimes feel in the presence of the terrible visions of sleep.... The picture is above and beyond criticism ... We think it will require some time to get even on speaking terms with the 'Icebergs.'"^[17]

Art historian Jennifer Raab (2015) writes that what disturbed viewers of The Icebergs was its emptiness. Church's previous major landscapes related humanity with nature, whether pastorally or with a sense of conquest. A picture of barren ice could offer only solitude—"not Romantic solitude, but rather nature apart from man, shaped by gravity and entropy, resistant to symbolism. This was nature 'uncaring'; this was Darwin's nature."^[18] In her interpretation of the picture, its limited use of symbols leaves the viewer unable to resort to allegorical readings in the style of, for example, Thomas Cole, Church's teacher. The ship's mast is not sufficient to establish a narrative: "The Icebergs sets us up to construct a story, and yet the picture is more like Church's broadside: an ekphrastic description in which details are not treated hierarchically in terms of their value for the narrative."^[19]

Church did not find an American buyer, so the work sat in his Tenth Street studio for some time after the east-coast exhibitions. Thus the promotional methods that Church had adopted for his earlier "Great Pictures" were less successful with The Icebergs.^[20]

Before the canvas went to London in June 1863, Church renamed it The Icebergs, and he added the ship's mast,^[21] which provides a sense of scale and allows for a narrative aspect. A chromolithograph was made there in 1864; Church had put off this reproduction in the US based on the painting's reception. The canvas was well-received in London. Attending a preview for the painting were John Tyndall, Jane Franklin (second wife of the deceased John), Francis McClintock, John Rae, George Back, Edward Belcher, and Richard Collinson.^[22]

The Icebergs was purchased by Edward Watkin, a British Member of Parliament and railway entrepreneur, and kept at his home, Rose Hill, near Manchester. This was the first and only time that Church found a British patron, although he had tried before. The exhibitions of the painting in England may have influenced Edwin Landseer's 1864 painting, Man Proposes, God Disposes.

Following the death of Watkin in 1901, The Icebergs "more or less sank from sight for three quarters of a century".^[23] Rose Hill had become a boys' home, where the painting remained hanging all the while in a little-visited upper landing, while the American art market lost interest in the Hudson River School. As interest increased again in the 1970s, at least two American art dealers began to search for Church's "lost" painting, the lithograph of which had appeared on the cover of a 1966 book about Church in case it might help locate the painting. Both dealers came very close to locating it—some confusion arose from an 1867 report by Henry Tuckerman, a writer and contemporary of Church, that a "Mr. Watson, M.P." had purchased the painting, which was "corrected" to "Watkins" by a Boston paper in 1890. One investigator ended their journey at a wrong nearby house, and another identified Rose Hill as a likely location, but she was discouraged from trying to access the facility. Instead, she spoke by phone with the matron, Mair Baulch, who did not know about the painting in the home. The next year, the matron independently investigated the painting when she was looking to raise money for another property. She inquired by letter to the Art Institute of Chicago, which she had once visited, and got as far as negotiating a price. The City Council of Manchester by this time intervened, and refused the Art Institute's first offer. Instead, a city manager contacted Sotheby's in London, and the painting was transferred to the Manchester City Art Gallery. The gallery wanted to keep the painting, which was now confirmed to be city property, but Sotheby's estimate of $500,000 was too significant to ignore.^[24]

The painting was shipped to Sotheby's in New York City, where it was auctioned on October 25, 1979, for $2.5 million. The rediscovery of The Icebergs came as Church's legacy was re-ascending. American museums had begun to acquire Church's work in the 1960s and 1970s, exhibitions were mounted, and new scholarly work appeared. Not only was the amount the most ever paid at auction for an American painting—which had been $980,000 for George Caleb Bingham's The Jolly Flatboatmen—but it was the third-highest amount paid for any painting at auction. The two higher amounts belonged to Diego Velazquez's Portrait of Juan de Pareja ($5.24 million) and Titian's The Death of Actaeon ($4 million). The Icebergs' record for an American painting stood until 1985, when Rembrandt Peale's Rubens Peale with a Geranium sold for $3.7 million.^[25] The anonymous buyer of The Icebergs put it on long-term loan with the Dallas Museum of Art, and soon donated it outright.

• 
  Broadside for The North, Boston, 1862
• 
  One of numerous 1859 sketches
• 
  One of numerous 1859 sketches
• 
  In Church's final study for the painting, a stranded ship has replaced the boulder.^[26]
• 
  Church made a portrait of Oosisoak, Isaac Israel Hayes' sled dog, in about two hours (c. 1861).^[27]
• 
  Church revisited icebergs in 1891.

Citations

Sources

• Harvey, Eleanor Jones; Church, Frederic Edwin (2002). The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church's Arctic Masterpiece. Dallas Museum of Art. ISBN 9780300095364.
• Mitchell, Timothy (1989). "Frederic Church's 'The Icebergs': Erratic Boulders and Time's Slow Changes". Smithsonian Studies in American Art. 3 (4): 3–23.
• Raab, Jennifer (2015). Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300212860.

• The Icebergs at the Dallas Museum of Art
• Noble, Louis L. (1861). After Icebergs with a Painter: A Summer Voyage to Labrador and around Newfoundland. New York: D. Appleton and Company.
• After Icebergs With a Painter (1861) at Faded Page (Canada)