![]() Carr proposes that contemporary operas may be "a less obvious but compelling parallel" to Church's landscape paintings of the late 1850s and early 1860s. ![]() In his catalogue for The Icebergs' debut at the Dallas Museum of Art, Gerald L. The second, a chartered schooner from Saint John's into the northern waters of the Strait of Belle Isle and Battle Harbour, was the Integrity. The first, from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Saint John's, Newfoundland, was called Merlin. ![]() Ken Kelsey, Gail Davitt, Mary Ann Allday, Troy Smythe, and Barbara Barrett, Art of the Americas at the Dallas Museum of Art, DMA Teaching Packet, 1994.Įleanor Jones Harvey, The Voyage of the 'Icebergs': Frederic Edwin Church's Arctic Masterpiece (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 2002).Ĭhurch's search for frozen subjects took place aboard two ships. "Frederic Edwin Church, The Icebergs," DMA Connect, Dallas Museum of Art, 2012. William Keyse Rudolph, DMA Label copy (1979.28), May 2006. It was immediately donated to the Dallas Museum of Art by an anonymous benefactor, revealed in 2010 to be Lamar and Norma Hunt of Dallas. Her hopes were far exceeded when, in 1979, The Icebergs sold at Sotheby’s for a price that broke all existing auction records for American paintings. In 1978, Mair Baulch, the matron of the juvenile detention facility, brought the painting into public view in hopes of raising money to purchase a run-down piece of land for the boys’ recreation. The property changed hands several times until Rose Hill and its unrecognized artistic treasure were acquired by the City of Manchester to house a social services facility for boys. Apart from six years (1915-1921) when it hung in a nearby church, The Icebergs remained at Rose Hill, Watkin's estate in Northenden, outside of Manchester. The work was well-received in England and soon purchased by Sir Edward William Watkin (1819-1901), a railroad magnate and member of Parliament. Several preliminary studies of the painting that include the mast as well as a full-scale boat indicate that Church struggled to adequately convey the immensity of the subject. The mast may refer to Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Northwest Passage, but it also served to establish scale in the painting. (For many Americans, the Arctic North and the Union North were inextricably intertwined.) His exact reasons for the inclusion of the broken mast are unknown. ![]() In deference to England’s support of the Confederate side of the Civil War, Church changed the title from The North to The Icebergs. The text emphasized the various glacial features and dazzling optical effects on display.ĭuring the preparations for sending the work abroad, Church altered it in two ways: a new title and the addition of a mast in the foreground. Viewers paid a quarter to see the painting and received a printed broadside (descriptive essay) that gave an introduction to the unfamiliar vista. In 1863, Church decided to send the work to London, where he had a strong following and had profitably exhibited The Heart of the Andes as well as Niagara (1857, Corcoran Gallery of Art).įor its display, Church arranged to have The Icebergs draped in crimson and installed by itself in an opulently appointed room. Unfortunately, the war made buyers for such a monumental work hard to find. From New York, it traveled to Boston and continued to receive ardent praise from American audiences. While on view in the U.S., Church’s painting was titled The North, and all exhibition proceeds were donated the Union’s Patriotic Fund (today’s Red Cross). Twelve days after the attack on Fort Sumter ignited the American Civil War, The Icebergs debuted in New York on April 24, 1861. The process took him less than six months, and The Icebergs was first exhibited in 1861. His goal was to capture both the essence of his experiences among icebergs and the other-worldly sense of the Arctic environment, drawn from explorers’ written accounts and contemporary reports. As with his earlier blockbuster landscape, The Heart of the Andes (1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art), he paired his on-site observations with his imagination. He spent several weeks on a sixty-five ton schooner and used a small rowboat to venture over the deadly waters and closely study the forms and colors of icebergs in the Arctic landscape.Īfter returning to his New York City studio, Church relied on nearly one hundred pencil and oil sketches to create a large-scale painting of icebergs. In 1859, Church chartered a month long expedition in the North Atlantic, off the Canadian coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. Yet in reality, the scene is an inhospitable place filled with danger, as the broken mast in the foreground indicates. The seductively inviting colors, glowing subterranean light, and glossy, tactile surfaces of the icebergs attract the viewer’s eye. The Icebergs is a superb example of Frederic Edwin Church’s technical skill and clever marketing.
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