Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez

At the height of his critical and popular acclaim in 1859, Frederic Edwin Church, one of the most prominent of the luminists, set sail for waters off the Newfoundland coast. He wanted to sketch the icebergs there. They seemed to him the very embodiment of light in nature. Following a three-week cruise, he returned to his studio in New York to execute a large painting. The small field sketches he made—some are no larger than the palm of your hand—have a wonderful, working intimacy about them. He captures both the monolithic inscrutability of icebergs and the weathered, beaten look they have by the time they arrive that far south in the Labrador Sea. Looking closely at one drawing, made on July 1, I noticed that Church had penciled underneath it the words “strange supernatural.” The oil painting he produced from these sketches came to be called The Icebergs. It is so imposing—6 feet by 10 feet wide—a viewer feels he can almost step into it, which was Church’s intent. In the foreground is a shelf of ice, part of an iceberg that fills most of the painting and which rises abruptly in the left foreground. On the right, the flooded ice shelf becomes part of a wave-carved grotto. In the central middle ground is a becalmed embayment, opening onto darker ocean waters to the left, which continue to a stormy horizon and other, distant icebergs. Dominating the background on the far side of the embayment is a high wall of ice and snow that carries all the way to the right of the paintin...