How Church Painted the Icebergs

In 1859,  American artist Frederic Church (1826-1900) commissioned a schooner to just take him on a plein-air painting expedition to “Iceberg Alley,” a unsafe location encompassing Newfoundland and Labrador. 

The big painting is now in the Dallas Museum of Artwork, but was missing for several years.

It’s a small display, with Church’s artwork occupying just one particular upstairs bed room. Unfortunately the present doesn’t include any of the paintings in this post, rather relying on notes and documentary information. But if you haven’t toured the residence of Olana, it really is value checking out.

Louis Noble, who accompanied Church on the expedition, famous that the artist had a bad case of sea illness through most of the voyage, but he painted in any case, applying a paintbox open up on his lap. 

Noble claimed: “While I have been chatting, the painter, who sits midship, with his thin, wide box on his knees, generating his easel of the open lid, has been dashing in the colors.”

Noble carries on: “Again, the painter wipes his brushes, puts absent his second picture, and tacks a new pasteboard in the cover of his box, and offers phrase to pull for the south-western facet.”

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Ebook: The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church’s Arctic Masterpiece by Eleanor Jones Harvey