Frederic Edwin Church, American, - Floating Icebergs near St. Lewis Bay, Canada - July 13 and 14, 1859 v1 - T-Shirt

This 1859 drawing shows massive icebergs drifting through open northern water near St. Lewis Bay, Canada, rendered as a quiet, close study of ice and sea.

Visual Elements & Composition

The work is drawn in graphite with white gouache on brown paper. The brown ground sets a dull, warm tone, and the white gouache lifts the bright planes of the icebergs out of it. The ice masses dominate the sheet, rising as heavy, angular forms above a stretch of seascape with little else to compete for attention. The composition stays spare and open, with the eye moving from one floating mass to the next.

Meaning & Symbolism

Church made this study during his 1859 voyage aboard the schooner The Hotspur to the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland, where he sought arctic scenery at first hand. Sketches like this one became the groundwork for his large-scale canvases of the far north. As a leading figure of the Hudson River School, he combined scientific observation with a sense of the sublime, and the icebergs here stand for nature at its most vast and indifferent, a subject that ran through his whole career.

Wearing the Unisex Heavy Cotton Tee

A tee is seen up close and moves with the body, so the drawing reads in pieces as you turn and walk. The large ice forms sit across the chest, where the brown-paper ground and white highlights hold the eye. Like the sketch itself, the print is meant to be looked at directly, one study of the northern sea at a time.