Tag: Olana

The Icebergs by Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), 1861. Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, gift of Norma and Lamar Hunt. Olana—the historic estate of Hudson River school artist Frederic Edwin Church, with its faux-Persian mansion surrounded by a landscape devised by the painter as a living work of art—is hosting winter art exhibitions for the first time. The subject of the inaugural show is seasonally appropriate—the story behind The Icebergs, one of Church’s most famous “great pictures,” a forty-five square-foot depiction of forbidding mountains of ice afloat in the North Atlantic. The Icebergs was the result of a sea voyage that Church took along the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador in the summer of 1859. Arctic regions were much in the public mind at the time, following the disappearance of British explorers who embarked in 1845 to seek a Northwest Passage, and reports from the many subsequent expeditions that set out to learn their fate. Church completed The Icebergs in 1861, and arranged for single-painting exhibitions that spring in New York and Boston. (Admission price: 25 cents.) Shortly before the first show was to open, the Civil War broke out and Church, always a canny marketer, renamed the painting The North—an emblem of the coolheaded Union opposing the intemperate Southern rebels. Study for ‘The Icebergs’ by Church, 1860. Except as noted, the objects illustrated are in the Olana State Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Hudson, New York. Amid the excitement over the war, Church’s painting did not create the sensation he hoped for, nor did it find a buyer. Before sending the painting to London for a show in 1863, Church restored the original title and painted a