Arailway magnate who helped back what later became the CanadianPacific route across Canada, he once compared this undertaking toa 'Northwest Passage by land.' Indeed, while traveling to Americato oversee his interests, he encountered some icebergs and wasmoved to describe them at some length in his journal.įeldman, having uncovered this entry, feltcertain that Watkin was her man. The art historian Sandra Feldman, reading over lettersand accounts of the painting's showings in England, had narrowedthe field of potential buyers to three, among whom one man,Edward William Watkin, seemed to her the likeliest suspect. Yet perhaps because she is anxious not to offend any ofthe parties, she leaves unresolved the question of who shouldactually receive credit for rescuing Church's canvas fromoblivion. The story has all the makings of aninternational thriller, with art historians flying back and forthacross the Atlantic, searching old real estate listings and auction records for any trace of a painting which, at64 x 112 inches and nearly five hundred pounds unframed, wouldseem rather difficult to lose.Įleanor Jones Harvey recounts the searchfor and discovery of the painting in considerable detail, and thestory's intrinsic drama will have readers on the edge of theirseats. Carrcontributes an essay to Harvey's new book, but it is not muchmore than a postscript to his earlier account the main purposeof this new book, we are told, is to celebrate the twentiethanniversary of the Dallas Museum's acquisition of Church'smasterpiece, and tell its story from the moment of itsrediscovery in 1979. Carr, whose book on Church's "Icebergs"was commissioned in 1979 by the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. This fascinating story has been told beforeby Gerald L. Hayes'ssketches and paintings of "Church Peak" - an Arcticpromontory he named for his friend - served as the basis forChurch's second-best known Arctic canvas, the ethereal yetmajestic "Aurora Borealis." Finally, wishing to seeicebergs for himself, Church booked passage on a northboundsteamer with his old friend Louis Legrand Noble, togetherproducing an account of their voyage under the title AfterIcebergs with a Painter, which appearedjust in time to serve as advance publicity for Church's"great painting of the North" when it debuted in NewYork in 1861. On the basis of their sharedfascination, they later became close friends, collaborating onplans and sketches after Hayes's second Arctic voyage. John Rae, discoverer of the first definite signs of SirJohn Franklin's lost expedition. Hayes then met Churchthrough the American Geographical and Statistical Society, ofwhich both were members on one occasion, they attended a lecturefrom Dr. Elisha KentKane on his second search for Franklin in 1853, was an amateurartist himself, as well as a pioneer photographer, and broughtback sketches and paintings from his voyages which were toexercise a powerful influence on Church. The origins of Church's own Arctic passionwere entwined with the actual explorers whose search for Franklinin the 1850's was the subject of tremendous interest in bothEngland and the United States, particularly with Dr. Most strikingly, this enormously important canvas was, formore than a century, lost - as lost as the crewmen of Sir JohnFranklin's vanished ships, in memory of whose deaths the brokenmast in the painting's foreground was added by the painter as asilent but widely-recognized elegiac sign. ![]() Church not onlycaptured, in a single frame, the essence of the Arctic Sublime,but the variegated history of his stunning canvas closelyparallels the rise and fall of the larger trans-Atlanticfascination with the "Frozen Regions" of which it is apart. Perhaps no image so crystallizes -if one will pardon the pun - the mid-nineteenth century'senduring obsession with the Arctic and its explorers as doesFrederic Edwin Church's Icebergs. New Haven and London: Yale University Press The Voyage of the Icebergs:Frederic Edwin Church's Arctic Masterpiece ![]() The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Edwin Church's Arctic Masterpiece
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