Frederic Edwin Church’s Beautiful Pantings of Icebergs Between Labrador and Greenland, 1859 – 1861

In the summer of 1859, American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) took trip aboard a schooner to Newfoundland and Labrador to observe icebergs. Louis Legrand Noble wrote up the excursion in the book After Icebergs with a Painter. In 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, Church exhibited Icebergs: The North at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.

The Icebergs is a superb example of Frederic Edwin Church’s technical skill and clever marketing. The seductively inviting colors, glowing subterranean light, and glossy, tactile surfaces of the icebergs attract the viewer’s eye. Yet in reality, the scene is an inhospitable place filled with danger, as the broken mast in the foreground indicates.

h/t: flashbak