the sea. Their relationship is mutual. Each partner benefits. By way of encouraging them to turn back, the fishermen tell our two dilettantes a secret worthy of the best pirate stories: ‘No jackal is more loyal to its lion, no pilot fish to its shark, than the fog to its berg.’3 A chill runs down Church and Noble’s spines: they understand that, in such reciprocal living pairs, the iceberg is the predator. Mists follow it everywhere. They are inseparable.
At the beginning of July 1859, a group of thirteen icebergs encircles the schooner. The painter and the narrator are ecstatic. They will finally be able to examine them closely. The boat is lowered. With the necessary care. When icebergs roll over, they take everything with them in their chaotic movements and cause panic around them. Sections of ice can collapse and crush the boat. The captain on board orders the rowers to keep a respectable distance.
For several minutes they make their way through the floating masses, taking advantage of a clearing in the sky and a calm sea. They hear all kinds of creaking noises. Intrigued, they turn around this group, whispering incomprehensible words. The reverend fills in his notebooks. He describes the electric murmur of the wind, the sounds of the water carving the walls, the countless plays of light. The show reinforces his conviction that nature is not monochrome but ‘polychrome’. Church, for his part, paints one gouache after another with a precision that belies the low swell.
Icebergs are multifaceted. They are always changing their appearance. So much so that Noble has the feeling that he’s seeing more than one iceberg when he walks along one of them. The first two bergs of a few days earlier had already captivated him. His imagination had been fired: he had seen the tent of a nomadic people in the thinnest iceberg and the vault of a greenish marble mosque in the thickest. It was as if there were secret correspondences between deserts of ice and deserts of sand. Then the masses disappeared in silence. The narrator had not even heard a sound as they fled.4
Among the icebergs, Noble experiences a kind of joyful stupor, like a deep empathy with another being. It is the joy of the ‘Indian’ faced with a deer, the unprecedented happiness of finally finding a ‘wild’ world. He no longer knows which metaphor to choose. One after another, he makes out Chinese buildings, a Colosseum, the silhouette of a Greek Parthenon, a cathedral in the early Gothic style, and the ruins of an alabaster city. Icebergs are great imitators. They recapitulate the history of world architecture with disconcerting ease. The Arctic Ocean becomes an open-air art gallery, a sanctuary of human creativity. Icebergs also summarise geological history. They evoke natural landforms located in the four corners of the globe. Sometimes they resemble ‘miniature alpine mountains’, sometimes the eternal snows of an Andean massif that the ocean has submerged. At this point in the story, Noble assures his readers that he and his painter friend share the views of the famous geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt had just died in Berlin. He had spent his life establishing that the ‘cosmos’ is unified in all its parts.
This episode with the group of icebergs changes the fate of our narrator. Nothing is really the same any more. The rest of the journey is a chaos of images. The more he crosses paths with other behemoths, the more Noble forges new ones to illustrate the encounters: a warship with pointed cannons and a sharp bow, ivory carvings, clouds depicting the faces of poets, philosophers or polar bears. He describes caves, niches, balconies and escarpments. He guesses that the icebergs cast a melancholy gaze on the ship’s passengers. He is saddened by the way some are obviously fragile. Meanwhile, on deck, Church finishes his preparatory oil studies. Then, in his cabin, he pencils a few sketches on the pages of a small notebook and carefully arranges his boxes.
Framing icebergs
Two years after their return, the painter unveils an impressive work to the New York public: The North. The painting is 1.64 m by 2.85 m. It is April 1861, opinion was positive, but not unanimous: too much emptiness, no signs of humans. Church reworked his large canvas. He decided, on the spur of the moment, to show it in Europe. In June 1863, an evening for the launching was organised in London. A number of prominent people attended, including Lady Franklin and Sir Francis Leopold McClintock. Observers in the British capital could see a broken mast, still with its masthead, pointing to a boulder on the right. Church added the detail in the final version. No doubt to evoke the tragic sinking of the Franklin and as a reply to his critics. All around the icebergs there is the same veiled Arctic glow. The painter renamed his work with the title it still bears: The Icebergs.
What reading can we give this painting?
A text printed on a sheet of paper was distributed when it was presented, in 1862, at the Athenaeum in Boston. In it, the artist explains his choice of perspective. He addresses the audience:
The spectator is supposed to be standing on the ice, in a bay of the berg. The several masses are parts of one immense iceberg. Imagine an amphitheatre, upon the lower steps of which you stand, and see the icy foreground at your feet, and gaze upon the surrounding masses, all uniting in one beneath the surface of the sea. To the left is steep, overhanging, precipitous ice; to the right is a part of the upper surface of the berg. To that succeeds a inner gorge, running up between alpine peaks. In front is the main portion of the berg, exhibiting ice architecture in its vaster proportions. Thus the beholder has around him the manifold forms of the huge Greenland glacier after it has been launched upon the deep, and subjected, for a time, to the action of the elements – waves and currents, sunshine and storm.
Figure 1 Frederic Edwin Church, The Icebergs (1861–3), Dallas Museum of Art
Church trains the viewer’s eye by detailing aspects of the scene. He believes that the audience needs this. For at least two reasons. On the one hand, the iceberg is a spontaneously pictorial object. But the variety of its lines must be shown. Otherwise, the viewer risks becoming bored with so much uniformity. On the other hand, the beauty of the iceberg is intriguing. The proportions of the iceberg throw Archimedes’ principle into doubt. The mass seems very heavy. And yet it floats! It is so light, almost airy. How can the combination of weight and weightlessness be represented?
The painter has observed the bergs closely. He knows that their plasticity is a challenge. Their straight lines intertwine and their curves overlap. The icebergs constantly alternate foregrounds and backgrounds. They compose volumes that seem eternal. Then they dissolve into the air and the ocean. The massive ice cubes metamorphose into small balls of volatile flakes.
Church wants to control these ambivalences. He directs the gaze into a well-defined space. Better still, he plays with the frame, making the ice occupy three sides of the painting. He freezes the icebergs in their materiality and makes a stationary image from an inanimate, hieratic world that is ice in every direction, except for on high, where it opens onto a horizon tinted with the sun of a peaceful late afternoon. This framing of ice by ice, saving one side for the source of the light, has only one purpose: to make the spectators understand that the real texture of icebergs is that of light. In the eyes of the painter, it is light that reshapes the forms.
A boulder can be seen on the right-hand side of the painting. This is not an aesthetic whim. The art historian Timothy Mitchell has shown that Church was taking a stand in a scientific controversy between Louis Agassiz and Charles Lyell from 1845 to 1860. The debate between the two scientists centred, among other things, on the exact nature of ‘erratic’ rocks and the role of icebergs.
Agassiz defended the thesis of an ancient global glaciation in his famous Études sur les glaciers and several other lectures. During a primordial ‘ice age’, the Earth was covered, and the so-called erratic boulders, which often adorn the sides of glaciers, were signs of this. Lyell proposed another theory in his no less famous Manual
