The Icebergs

The Icebergs
Artist	Frederic Edwin Church
Year	1861
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	1.64 m × 2.85 m (5.4 ft × 9.4 ft)
Location	Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, US
Website	Dallas Museum of Art

The Icebergs is an 1861 oil painting by the American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church. It was inspired by his 1859 voyage to the North Atlantic around Newfoundland and Labrador. Considered one of Church's "Great Pictures"—measuring 1.64 by 2.85 metres (5.4 by 9.4 feet)^[1]—the painting depicts one or more icebergs in the afternoon light of the Arctic. It was first displayed in New York City in 1861, where visitors paid 25 cents' admittance to the one-painting show. Similar exhibitions in Boston and London followed. The unconventional landscape of ice, water, and sky generally drew praise, but the American Civil War, which began the same year, lessened critical and popular interest in New York City's cultural events.

The painting became popular within Church's oeuvre and inspired other landscape artists' interest in the Arctic, but its apparent lack of narrative or allegory perplexed some viewers. Between exhibitions in the US and England, Church added the ship mast to the painting, and retitled the work from its original The North. He eventually sold the painting in England, where it disappeared from the art-world's awareness after the buyer's death in 1901. In 1979, the painting, which a number of New York City galleries were now hunting, was rediscovered in a home in Manchester, England, where it had remained for most of the intervening 78 years. It was soon put to auction in New York City, drawing significant interest as its sale coincided with renewed critical interest in Church, who had been largely forgotten in the 20th century. The Icebergs was auctioned for US$2.5 million, the most of any American painting to that point. The buyers, later identified as businessman Lamar Hunt and his wife Norma, donated the canvas to the Dallas Museum of Art, where it remains today.