Explore the Reception of this artwork, The Icebergs.
Like Church's previous "great pictures", The Icebergs received a single-painting exhibition with an admission fee of 25 cents. It debuted in New York City at Goupil's from April 24 to July 9, 1861, and moved to the Boston Athenæum the next year. The exhibition rooms were prepared theatrically; the painting, itself 1.64 m × 2.85 m (5.4 ft × 9.4 ft), had a massive carved frame, and the room had emerald carpet and maroon divans and wall-cloths. The outbreak of the Civil War put a damper on exhibition attendance, as New York World observed on April 29: "Upon ordinary occasions a new picture by Mr. Church would be for a time an object of central attention to the cultivated community of New York. At present the war excitement absorbs every other, and the picture of the 'Icebergs' has been placed on view at Goupil's without attracting special attention. Last year the announcement of such a work would have packed the gallery from morning till night for weeks; now so intense and eager is the interest concentrated upon the capital, the movements of forces, and the pageantry wherein the town has draped itself, that we doubt if any considerable number of our citizens are aware of its exhibition..."Church's paintings were greatly anticipated, and many critics responded positively to The Icebergs. The New-York Daily Tribune called it "the most splendid work of art that has as yet been produced in this country.... It is an absolutely wonderful picture, a work of genius that illustrates the time and the country producing it." While The Icebergs was well received, some critics had difficulty relating to the painting. Some resorted to the imaginative, suggesting that the cavern or grotto was the "haunt" of fairies, sirens, or mermaids. In its original form, as seen in the US, the ship's mast had not yet been painted in; thus the painting had no narrative possibility or easily observed meaning. The Albion warned that "ordinary observers ... may perhaps experience some slight disappointment when they miss all familiar objects and find no trace whatever of human association ... no connecting link of any sort between themselves and the canvas." The New York World wrote, "We shall be surprised if those of acute sensibilities do not look upon it at first with a positive feeling of pain, akin to that which we sometimes feel in the presence of the terrible visions of sleep.... The picture is above and beyond criticism ... We think it will require some time to get even on speaking terms with the 'Icebergs.'" Church did not find an American buyer, so the work sat in his Tenth Street studio for some time after the east-coast exhibitions.
Jennifer Raab writes that what disturbed viewers of The Icebergs was its emptiness. Church's previous landscapes related nature with humanity, often via religious symbols. A picture of barren ice offered only solitude—"not Romantic solitude, but rather nature apart from man, shaped by gravity and entropy, resistant to symbolism. This was nature 'uncaring'; this was Darwin's nature." In Raab's analysis of the picture, its limited use of symbols leaves the viewer unable to resort to allegorical readings like those commonly found in the work of Thomas Cole, Church's teacher. Even the addition of the ship's mast is not enough to establish a narrative, according to Raab: "The Icebergs sets us up to construct a story, and yet the picture is more like Church's broadside: an ekphrastic description in which details are not treated hierarchically in terms of their value for the narrative."
Iceberg Thomas Cole Goupil's Church in Tenth Street studio Boston Athenæum divan Raab New York World ship's mast ekphrastic broadside