“There it is, at last, the picture we have all known was waiting for us: the new work of the year, which is as surely and sternly required of a famous painter as of a successful novelist . . . It is as bold a picture as ever was painted, for there is nothing before you but air, light, and water.”1
Frederic Church was trying to shoe-horn the untamed wild world into his well-ordered worldview. That worldview was pious and theological, but also bent towards romantic naturalism in the stamp of his adventurer-scientist idol, Alexander von Humboldt.2 His pictures map a grand patterning of the universe, with a Judeo-Christian deity atop a Great Chain of Being, a place beneath for every toiler and prince and all that creepeth — a cosmology that was agreeable to clergy, politician, and railroad magnate alike.
Church was not alone in this—his rivals Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran were equally romantic in their elisions of the discontents of Western expansion. But Church was particularly good at it: he built narratives within and around his Big Pictures,3 and the religious and political themes they allegorically explored were discussed and dissected eagerly in the papers. They were hotly-anticipated before their release, shocking upon unveiling, and continued to draw at the box office for months after opening, on both sides of the Atlantic. They were like Christopher Nolan movies—anticipated, successful, and then think-pieced for years to come.4
But after the massive success of Heart of the Andes, Church made a series of missteps — in subject, in allegory, and timing. The painter boarded a boat toward the Arctic Circle, braving seasickness and chancing an icy doom, with the same resolve as he had for his views of South American volcanoes (and just like Humboldt had). And in 1859, he set to work on the paintings that would culminate two years later. He carefully guarded the news emerging from his studio and slowly hyped the next F. E. Church joint:
Icebergs!
Heart of the Andes was still in tour when Church’s iceberg painting debuted, and the painter undertook the same marketing scheme, generating three revenue streams. He bypassed the National Academy to instead exhibit at a private gallery, where he could charge admission. The picture would then travel to London where it would be copied for reproduction in the best lithography studio in the world. The lithos would sell to a popular audience, and then Church’s agents would finalize a private sale of the canvas itself. Thus, Church stood to make a killing three ways: box office, copyright to the publisher, and outright sale.
If it went anything like Heart of the Andes, it would be many tens of thousands of dollars in 1861.
Nice work if you can get it.
II. I said, ICEBERG!
But this time, Church couldn’t. Fort Sumter was attacked on April 11, 1861, beginning the Civil War, and two weeks later, Church unveiled his new creation in New York.
Fearing there would be no time for escapist fantasies at war time, Church hastily tried to pack in an additional metaphor—he retitled the giant picture of ice as The North. Why not pick a side? The South wasn’t going to contribute a nickel to the box office take anyway. And in case anyone missed the reference, he announced that the proceeds of the gate would go to a fund for Union soldiers’ widows.
It was a box-office flop. But, stiff upper lip, chum — after a run in Boston, the painting was off to England for lithographing and further exhibition. Heart of the Andes had done well there, and even Queen Victoria had stopped by. But Britons were divided on the American Civil War, so the late-addition of pro-Union subtext had to be scrapped. He changed the name back to The Icebergs, and painted in evidence of shipwreck in the foreground, which allowed the picture to be read as a parable about exploration, advancement of science, etc. Pro-Southern newspapers in England ignored the picture, and pro-Unionists fixed on the scientific/exploration aspects of the picture.
The ploy worked, and Church was saved from metaphorical shipwreck on his own iceberg.
III. Ice, Ice Baby.
The Icebergs caused a sensation in England, where recent polar expeditions were fresh in the popular memory. The English had a thing for the poles, after all:
“The Captain of the Pole-Star” marked [Arthur Conan-Doyle’s] first contribution to a largely overlooked body of literature: nineteenth-century polar fiction. This unusual subgenre found a kind of epigraph in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great cautionary tale in verse, the 1798 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (“The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around.”) By the end, it included works by many of the greatest writers of the era, or of any era: Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens.5
Kathryn Schulz describes the “largely overlooked body of literature”:
Almost invariably, the poles appear in these works as the place where nature reveals its horrifying indifference to humanity; where humanity itself falls away, leaving men to descend into madness and violence; above all, where the dream of universal mastery goes catastrophically awry.6
Church’s addition of a shipwreck to The Icebergs, especially for English audiences, struck exactly this chord. As late as the 1850s, explorers understood the “well-known fact that there exists to the North of the Siberian coast and, at a comparatively short distance from it, a sea open at all seasons” — in other words, the poles themselves were warm and navigable by boat, if only one could get past a ring of ice. British expeditions northward peppered the first half of the nineteenth century; tales of their universally tragic ends lit the popular English imagination. Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein (1818) wanders the snowy expanse; Charles Dickens collaborated on a play about its exploration (1857); Jane Austen sent an absent husband northward in 1817’s Persuasion. The British Empire considered the north pole to be just another resource that they could colonize with the proper English resolve. After Church’s Icebergs, a spate of polar paintings by British painters kept the wheel of Arctic Madness spinning — from Edwin Landseer’s Man Proposes God Disposes, in 1864 to the Anglo-American Thomas Moran’s Spectres of the North in 1891.
IV. Domestic Legacy.
Back in America, Church’s arctic work built a framework for other painters to build on. Other tenants in the Tenth Street Studio Building, Albert Bierstadt and William Bradford, both took painting trips to the Arctic Circle. Bradford built an entire career off the painting and photographs he made there, although his work was of an entirely different character than Church’s. But even more than inspiring other artists, Church’s legacy took the form of propelling further polar exploration, akin to the quest to visit the moon in the twentieth century. That conquest of space has eclipsed the polar fever that gripped the English-speaking globe in the nineteenth century, but it remains in force, as photographers like Neelon Crawford7 and painters like Richard Estes have continued to marvel at this still unconquered frontier.
But held in a different angle, the lesson learned from Church’s The North was its folly. The subject matter was fascinating, but the pained moralizing and strained shoe-horning of untamed nature into a rigid hierarchy was as doomed as those polar expeditions. Look in awe, future painters intoned — but try to bottle these forces, and you may not make it out.
Or, as Edwin Landseer put it, in the title of his 1864 painting of polar disaster:
“Man proposes, God disposes.”
True in canvas as on ice.
The painters of the “late Hudson River School” proceeded with caution toward their own observations of nature — and the decade of work to follow was less colonizing in its gaze, and arguably, more quietly observant. From 1860-70, a somber reverence descended upon the naturalist painters in America — and to this chastened naturalism we turn in two weeks, in Rock Portraits of the 60s.
And The North — the painting itself? Though it launched many a vessel, Church’s iceberg sank from view. it was bought quietly by a British railroad magnate and remained in England, where it languished in the stairwell of a private home for over a century.
Nothing is final in the world of art, but the there is one more post-script to the painting — a postscript worthy of its own post. Find it right here next week, in your weekly Hanging Papers. We are also proud to announce that Jonathan Miller Spies Fine Art will be presenting a booth at this spring’s New York installment of the Affordable Art Fair. Drop us a line or check out the latest here, and we hope to see you there.
Thanks for looking carefully,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Theodore Winthrop (probably), “The Lounger. Church’s New Picture,” Harper’s Weekly, April 24, 1861, pp. 242-243.
He called them ‘Great Pictures,’ but were they? They were inarguably large.
I love a good Christopher Nolan think-piece. You can find ours on Tenet here, and Batman Begins here.
Kathryn Schulz, “A Critic at Large: Literature’s Arctic Obsession,” The New Yorker, April 24, 2017, here.
As quoted by Schulz, 2017.
Read our article on Crawford, here.