The Cold Oblivion of Frederic Edward Church

Frederic Edward Church did not paint The Icebergs to make winter look pretty. He painted it to show humanity its sheer utter insignificance. It was 1861 and the United States was tearing itself apart. The massive oil on canvas debuted in New York City just twelve days after the attack on Fort Sumter. While the country prepared to drown in its own blood Church offered them an entirely different kind of cold oblivion.

He actually chartered a ship to Newfoundland just to sketch these frozen monsters. He stood in the freezing spray and studied the brutal architecture of ice and water. Then he took those sketches back to his studio and painted a masterpiece over nine feet wide. Church added a broken mast into the foreground to honor a lost arctic explorer. That splintered wood is a quiet reminder that nature always wins.

You would think a historic artifact born at the edge of the Civil War would be carefully guarded. You would be wrong. The canvas disappeared for over a century. It vanished entirely before casually surfacing in an English home for boys. When it finally hit the auction block in 1979 it sold for a record breaking two and a half million dollars. It turns out people will always pay a premium to look at their own doom wrapped up in beautiful blues and whites.

 

References

Avery, Kevin J. Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999.

Huntington, David C. The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church. New York: George Braziller, 1966.