'The Icebergs' Is One of Frederic Edwin Church's Most Spectacular Paintings. For Decades, No One Knew Where It Was

Frederic Edwin Church was seasick as he tried to sketch a luminous iceberg flowing south on the Labrador current. The artist and his friend Louis Legrand Noble had traveled all the way to Newfoundland from New York City in 1859 so Church could study the massive mountains of ice in their natural surroundings. It had been his idea to take to the rowboat, so he could get close enough to capture the textures of the ice against the sea as it melted into the horizon.

He sketched the play of light and gloom on the icy crags until he had a stack of studies to compensate for his misery. Church “painted with great effect” despite the vessel’s heaving, wrote Noble, whose stomach was no better off than the artist’s. Two years later, when Church created a grand painting in his New York studio based on those oil sketches, it was from the point of view of someone on solid ground.

His artwork, called The Icebergs, measured 5.4 feet by 9.4 feet and echoed the era’s obsession with Arctic exploration—particularly John Franklin’s lost expedition, which had left England in 1845 to find the Northwest Passage. The artist read the American adventurer Elisha Kent Kane’s best-selling account of his harrowing attempt to find Franklin, and he befriended Isaac Israel Hayes, the surgeon on Kane’s expedition. Church even attended a lecture by the Scottish explorer John Rae and viewed evidence he collected that proved Franklin’s shocking fate.

The Icebergs captured the beauty and menace of the Arctic in exquisite detail and thrilled paying audiences. But the onset of the American Civil War forced Church to find a buyer for the painting in England, where a member of Parliament acquired it for his private collection after an 1863 showing in London. Then, around the start of the 20th century, the trail of The Icebergs went cold—until art historians in the 1960s began looking for the mysteriously missing painting.

In early 1861, 34-year-old Church was America’s most famous landscape painter. He had survived the trip to Newfoundland and retraced the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s journey through South America, expanding his thematic and visual vocabulary. In exhilarating landscapes like Niagara (1857) and Heart of the Andes (1859), Church painted with “technical virtuosity and poetry that most of his contemporaries felt was the greatest they had ever seen,” says Victoria Johnson, author of Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World.

Church was “an ardent Unionist” who vowed to donate the money from the premiere to a fund supporting Union soldiers’ families, Harvey writes in The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church’s Arctic Masterpiece. People paid 25 cents each to file into a darkened gallery where The North was the sole exhibit. The painting, displayed in a theatrical proscenium behind drawn-back curtains, showed jagged pillars of blue-green ice framing a berg that glowed against the smoky gray sea and sky.