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‘The Icebergs’ Is One of Frederic Edwin Church’s Most Spectacular Paintings. For Decades, No One Knew Where It Was
In the 1970s, the administrator of a boys’ home in England wound up finding the missing 19th-century piece and bringing it back into the spotlight
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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.
“Church gets caught up in that Arctic mania,” says Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator of 19th-century art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 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.
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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.
“An Arctic iceberg could speak of the North’s unity and strength but also of nature’s glittering indifference to human ambition,” Johnson writes in the biography. “An exploding volcano could depict the moral cataclysm of slavery but also the ungovernable forces that shape the cosmos.”
Quick facts: Church and Cole
- Church learned the techniques of landscape painting from Thomas Cole, a British-born artist whose works blended European Romanticism with scenes of America’s natural environment and who founded the Hudson River School art movement.
- Cole taught only two students in his lifetime. Church was the first, beginning in 1844; Benjamin McConkey was the second, starting in 1845.
For the painting’s unveiling in New York on April 24, 1861, Church changed its title from The Icebergs to The North—an unmistakable allusion to the start of the Civil War just 12 days earlier, Johnson says. 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. Critics universally praised Church’s mastery of the sublime. “Such a picture was never painted before in this or any other country,” wrote one reviewer, and another declared, “the picture is above and beyond criticism.” Some viewers “took it as an image of Creation itself: protean, generative, and primordial—while others regarded it, as had Noble, as a phenomenon of the Last Days, an icy portent of the world’s end,” writes Russell A. Potter in Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818-1875.
The war chilled American buyers’ interest in the $10,000 work (around $380,000 today), however, and Church decided to exhibit The North in London. He reverted to the original title to avoid offending Britons’ Confederate sympathies, and he added a broken ship’s mast to the foreground, “presumably to commemorate those intrepid Arctic explorers who had lost their lives attempting to find the fabled Northwest Passage,” Harvey writes.
The strategy worked. Famous polar figures attended the London opening in June 1863, including Franklin’s indomitable widow, Jane, and Leopold McClintock, whose 1857 expedition located the sole written record of Franklin’s demise. A chromolithograph of The Icebergs was mass-produced for the public. After the opening, a railway executive and member of Parliament named Edward William Watkin bought The Icebergs for Rose Hill, his villa outside Manchester.
“When Watkin died in 1901,” Harvey writes, “he and The Icebergs disappeared from view.”
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Artistic tastes moved on from Church’s grand, Humboldtian visions to more introspective compositions after the Civil War. By the time Church died in 1900, his style of painting was so unfashionable that people weren’t even paying enough attention to The Icebergs to know it was missing.
“We didn’t start looking for it until we realized we no longer knew where it was,” Harvey tells Smithsonian magazine, “and that doesn’t happen until the 1960s.”
The art historian David Huntington, then a doctoral student at Yale University, was prompted by his adviser to write his dissertation on Church, then a forgotten 19th-century artist nobody seemed to know much about, Harvey says. In 1966, Huntington organized the first exhibit of Church’s paintings in more than six decades and wrote an accompanying catalog, which noted The Icebergs had “disappeared in England.”
“He puts the chromolithograph of The Icebergs on the cover of the catalog the same way that we used to put pictures of missing kids on milk cartons,” Harvey says.
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The picture piqued the interest of several art sleuths, including Sandra Feldman, a researcher at a New York gallery. In 1977, she began searching 19th-century newspapers for mentions of The Icebergs, and because the buyer had been reported over the years as a member of Parliament whose last name began with “W,” she studied three 1860s men who fit the bill. She researched each lawmaker’s career and family, then traveled to London to view their wills, hoping to identify her target based on their wealth and interests. Finally, knowing that American landscape paintings were popular with art-collecting European railroad executives, Feldman zeroed in on Watkin and Rose Hill.
Watkin’s estate had undergone several transformations since his death. In 1977, a Manchester social services agency was using the building as a home for delinquent boys. From London, Feldman called the home’s administrator, Mair Baulch, and asked if she happened to know of a huge painting of icebergs at the facility.
Baulch said she didn’t.
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The following year, Baulch needed to raise money for the expansion of the boys’ home and rummaged around Rose Hill for items to sell. She found a large, grimy canvas on the wall in a little-used stairwell and noticed the signature in the corner: F.E. Church 1861. Sensing that it was “a class painting,” Baulch corresponded with a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, who expressed enough interest in purchasing it that the painting’s then-owner, the Manchester City Council, decided to have Sotheby’s auction house take a look instead. The frameless canvas was brought outside; Baulch’s husband, Glen, took a photo of his wife standing next to it; and the snapshot was sent to London.
James Miller, Sotheby’s specialist in stray American paintings that turned up in England, received the picture in June 1979. “He looks at it and goes, ‘This looks really familiar,’” Harvey says. “He pulls the Frederic Church catalog off of his shelf, holds the Polaroid next to it, and then sends the photo to his colleagues in the New York office. And they all start screaming.”
Feldman was right: The Icebergs had been hiding in plain sight.
But how does a big painting go missing if it never leaves its original owner’s house? The building around it changes, Harvey says. “It’s a little bit like family photographs. All it takes is for one generation to die, and nobody recognizes who’s in the photograph anymore. So that’s how you lose the thread.”
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On October 24, 1979, The Icebergs sold at Sotheby’s auction in New York for $2.5 million, breaking the record for the highest amount paid for an American artwork to that date, besting the $980,000 paid for George Caleb Bingham’s The Jolly Flatboatmen. It also broke the record for any painting sold at an American auction, excelling past the $2.3 million for Rembrandt’s Aristotle With a Bust of Homer. Even seasoned auction-watchers were shocked that The Icebergs fetched the third-highest price for any painting at the time, behind Velazquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja ($5.5 million) and Titian’s The Death of Actaeon ($4 million).
The anonymous buyers, later revealed to be Kansas City Chiefs owners Lamar and Norma Hunt, eventually donated The Icebergs to the Dallas Museum of Art, where it is now on view.
Ultimately, the artwork’s rediscovery came down to Baulch’s need to raise cash. But Harvey gives credit to Huntington’s decision in the 1960s. “If he hadn’t put the chromolithograph of The Icebergs on the cover … the guy at Sotheby’s isn’t going to recognize it when Mair Baulch sends in that photograph,” she says.
Harvey recalls asking Huntington, “Why did you choose to put the chromolithograph of a missing painting on the cover of your catalog?”
“Most of us would have put Niagara Falls on the cover, or Heart of the Andes, or Cotopaxi,” she says. “And he said, ‘Because I wanted someone to recognize it.’ Without that, I’m not sure we have this story.”