Frederic Edwin Church, American, - Icebergs at Sea near Newfoundland, Canada - July 1, 1859 v1 - T-Shirt

This pencil and white-heightened study sheet catalogues a group of icebergs drawn off Newfoundland in July 1859, each form set down with the care of a field observation.

Visual Elements & Composition

Pale grey-green ground carries the whole sheet, and the icebergs sit against it in loose horizontal rows. Low, fractured masses with flecks of white highlight dominate the upper passages, while a tall, blocky berg at lower right is built from dense hatching across its faces. A few studies rest on a faint horizontal waterline; others float without a base, so the eye moves freely from one observation to the next. A handwritten notation and date sit at lower right, and a circular collection stamp appears at lower left.

Meaning & Symbolism

For nineteenth-century viewers, icebergs drifting along the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador stood for the Arctic and for a nature that dwarfed human effort. Frederic Edwin Church, a leading member of the Hudson River School and a pupil of Thomas Cole, made this sheet during his 1859 voyage to the North Atlantic. The studies record how ice cracks, turns and catches light, from angular fractures to translucent, sculpted surfaces. Drawings and oil sketches from that voyage prepared his large-scale painting The Icebergs (1861), now in the Dallas Museum of Art, and this sheet shows the rigorous observation behind it.

Carried on the Chest

A tee gives this artwork a broad, open field, so the rows of icebergs spread across the shirt as they do across the sheet. The sublime scale and cool, austere mood of the study read clearly at a distance and up close alike, and the handwritten notation and stamp become small details to find as the shirt is worn.