The Icebergs is an 1861 oil painting by American painter Frederic Edwin Church. It was inspired by his voyage in 1859 to the North Atlantic around Newfoundland and Labrador. As another of Church's "Great Pictures"—measuring 1.64 by 2.85 metres (5.4 ft × 9.4 ft)^[1]—it was exhibited by itself to a paying audience in New York, Boston, and London. The unconventional landscape of ice, water, and sky generally drew praise, but the American Civil War, which began the same year, lessened critical and popular interest in New York City's artistic happenings.

It became popular within Church's oeuvre and lead to other landscape artists' interest in the Arctic, but its apparent lack of narrative or allegory perplexed some viewers. Between exhibitions in the US and England, Church added the ship mast, providing some sign of life, and retitled the work from its original The North. He eventually sold the painting in England, where it disappeared from the art-world's awareness after the buyer's death in 1901. In 1979, the painting, which a number of New York City galleries were now hunting, was rediscovered in a home in Manchester, England, where it had remained for most of the intervening 78 years. It was soon put to auction in New York City, drawing significant interest as its sale coincided with renewed critical interest in Church, who had been largely forgotten in the 20th century. The Icebergs was auctioned for the most of any American painting to date. The anonymous buyer donated the canvas to the Dallas Museum of Art, where it remains today.

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. Francis Leopold McClintock finally uncovered the fate of Franklin and his crew, which he described in an 1859 book. Other Arctic topics of the day were the possibility of a Northwest Passage and an Open Polar Sea. Church too was interested in the Arctic, and 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 an Arctic peak at the Kennedy Channel after Church in 1861.^[3]

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. For about a month they travelled, in the area of Cape Race and along the Avalon Peninsula.^[4] 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 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, which took about six months, in the winter of 1860.^[1][5] 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 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 helped Union 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.^[6]

The painting is another of Church's composite views, like his popular The Heart of the Andes (1859), which combine elements from many sketches with the artist's imagination to convey the essential character of the locale.^[7] This approach to landscape painting was in accord with the aesthetic ideas of Alexander von Humboldt, the popular naturalist and science writer, and John Ruskin, the famous English art critic. A broadside was prepared for the edification of exhibition visitors, 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 Louis LeGrand Noble, for example, whose writing about Church's art had been so effusive.^[8] In orienting the viewer to this icy 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 upper 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]

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", wrote contemporary art historian Henry Tuckerman, with "little scope for general effect".^[10] The challenge to the painter was to make a grand landscape from an environment so limited in form, color, and living things. Gerald L. Carr writes, "By standards of its day, the composition was virtually abstract. Much was left to the imagination."^[11] Church told his agent that he was pleased with the canvas as he neared completion.^[12]

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".^[13]

A boulder rests on the shelf at right and stains the ice a rust color above the grotto. It is a reminder that the iceberg once made contact with land, and stands as 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.^[14] 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."^[15]

The details of the scene reward close inspection. The shapes in the ice sometimes form profiles of human-like faces, most pronounced in the "repoussoir" of ice on the left. As described by Carr, there are also intentional "vague humanoid profiles" on the right, "skull-like" ice blocks in the foreground, and a "floating ice-'siren'" near the grotto.^[16] In the foreground, melted water is a light blue, and at upper left a small waterfall deposits water into a patch of emerald beneath. and Church observed that freshly frozen water within the cracks of icebergs produced a striking blue color; these veins of blue are illustrated at left. In the distance, the largest iceberg shows old waterlines, indicating its continuing ascent, and the foreground appears wetter, having risen from the ocean more recently. Church's signature is on the block of ice to the left of the mast, which was painted in later, and may be seen to form a crucifix. Carr notes that the water level in the grotto is not consistent with that of the rest of the painting.^[17]

Like Church's major paintings before it, The Icebergs received a single-painting exhibition with an admission fee of 25 cents. It debuted in New York City at Goupil's from April 24 to July 9, 1861, and moved to the Boston Athenæum the next year. The exhibition rooms were prepared theatrically; the painting had a massive carved frame, and the room had emerald carpet and maroon divans and cloths over the walls.^[18] The outbreak of the Civil War put a damper on exhibition attendance, as New York World observed on April 29: "Upon ordinary occasions a new picture by Mr. Church would be for a time an object of central attention to the cultivated community of New York. At present the war excitement absorbs every other, and the picture of the 'Icebergs' has been placed on view at Goupil's without attracting special attention. Last year the announcement of such a work would have packed the gallery from morning till night for weeks; now so intense and eager is the interest concentrated upon the capital, the movements of forces, and the pageantry wherein the town has draped itself, that we doubt if any considerable number of our citizens are aware of its exhibition...".^[19]

Church's paintings were greatly anticipated, and for many critics 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."^[20] While The Icebergs was well received,^[21] some critics had difficulty relating to the painting. Some resorted to the imaginative, suggesting the cavern or grotto was the "haunt" of fairies, sirens, or mermaids.^[22] 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 or easily observed meaning. 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."^[23] 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.'"^[24]

Art historian Jennifer Raab writes that what disturbed viewers of The Icebergs was its emptiness. Church's previous major landscapes related nature with humanity, 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."^[25] In her interpretation of the picture, its limited use of symbols leaves the viewer unable to resort to allegorical readings in the style of Thomas Cole, Church's teacher. Even 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."^[26]

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.^[27]

Before the canvas went to London in June 1863, Church renamed it The Icebergs, and he added the ship's mast,^[30] 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 scientists and luminaries of Arctic expedition such as John Tyndall, Jane Franklin (second wife of the deceased John), Francis McClintock, John Rae, George Back, Edward Belcher, and Richard Collinson.^[31]

The Icebergs was purchased by Edward Watkin, a British Member of Parliament and businessman who played a role in the development of a trans-continental North American railroad. He hung the painting at his home, Rose Hill, now part of Manchester, England. This was the first and only time that Church found a British patron, although he had tried before.

Other artists were encouraged by the popular exhibition of The Icebergs to create their own Arctic pictures. In the US, marine artist William Bradford travelled to the North Atlantic a number of times beginning in 1861. Bradford was already interested in the Arctic, but Church's painting became an impetus for his career as an Arctic explorer, lecturer, and artist.^[32] His Arctic and iceberg paintings were exhibited in the US, England, and Germany. Albert Bierstadt made a number of iceberg paintings into the 1880s, and Thomas Moran produced Spectres of the North in 1891.^[33] The exhibitions of The Icebergs in England probably influenced Edwin Landseer's 1864 painting, Man Proposes, God Disposes, which depicts two polar bears tearing at a wreckage that would evoke the lost Franklin expedition.^[34][35]

Church himself returned to the northern theme once more in a major painting, Aurora Borealis (1865), considered a companion piece to the The Icebergs and exhibited in London that year in a three-painting Church exhibition.^[36] In 1863 he produced a smaller canvas of The Icebergs, then called To Illumine the Iceberg (29 × 47 cm), for patron Samuel Hallett, who paid $300.^[37] It is now in the collection of the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Connecticut.^[38] Nine years before his death in 1900, Church painted an iceberg again at his home in Olana, a much simpler composition that pleased him and was among his last paintings.^[39]

Following the death of Watkin in 1901, The Icebergs "more or less sank from sight for three quarters of a century".^[40] 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 Church and 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; these were all valid surnames of potential M.P.s. 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 Manchester City Council 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.^[41]

The painting was shipped to Sotheby's in New York City, where it was confirmed to be in excellent condition, needing only cleaning with soap and water, removal of varnish, and adjustments to the stretchers.^[42] The importance of the painting drew more sellers to Sotheby's planned auction, hoping to capitalize on the increasing interest in the semi-annual event. On October 25, 1979, eight to ten bidders participated in the Church auction, which lasted almost four minutes. Two telephone bidders remained at the $2 million mark, with the winning bid coming at $2.5 million.^[42] 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.^[43] The anonymous buyers of The Icebergs put it on long-term loan with the Dallas Museum of Art, and soon donated it outright. The buyers were identified in 2010 as businessman Lamar Hunt and his wife Norma,^[1] who had been equivocal on the subject in 1979, although contemporary reporting was quite certain.^[42] According to a 1980 magazine piece, Mair Bulch did not receive any of the sale proceeds to improve her facility, per her original intent.^[42]

The American press was sometimes critical of the painting and its price. In Time magazine, art critic Robert Hughes disparaged Church while commenting on the escalating prices paid for artworks: "If art was once expected to provoke un nouveau frisson, a new kind of shudder, its present function is to become a new type of bullion. Thus, we are told by art industry flacks, people now respect art. They flock to museums to see it; its spiritual value has been confirmed, for millions, by its wondrous convertibility into cash. You can't argue with it. It means something if somebody pays $2.5 million for a lummocking spread of icebergs by Frederic Church, a salon machine whose pedestrian invocations of the sublime are not worth one square foot of a good Turner."^[44][42]

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. The painting remains a core holding of the Dallas Museum of Art.

• 
  An 1860 study. Oil on paperboard; 16.3 cm × 26.3 cm (6.4 in × 10.4 in). Cooper-Hewitt Museum^[45]
• 
  An 1860 study. Oil on paperboard mounted on canvas; 21 cm × 31.1 cm (8.3 in × 12.2 in). Kennedy Galleries, New York ^[46]
• 
  Church made a portrait of Oosisoak, his friend Isaac Israel Hayes' sled dog, in about two hours (c. 1861).^[47]

Citations

Sources

• Carr, Gerald L. (1980). Frederic Edwin Church: The Icebergs. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
• Harvey, Eleanor Jones; Church, Frederic Edwin (2002). The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church's Arctic Masterpiece. Dallas Museum of Art. ISBN 9780300095364.
• Howat, John K.; Church, Frederic Edwin (2005). Frederic Church. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300109887.
• 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.

• 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)