Focus on The Icebergs and explain the Description.
The painting is one of Church's composite views, like his popular The Heart of the Andes (1859), in which he combined elements from many sketches with his imagination to convey the essential character of the setting. This approach to landscape painting accorded with the ideas of his aesthetic influences: Alexander von Humboldt, the popular naturalist and science writer who devoted a section of his Kosmos to landscape art; and John Ruskin, the famous English art critic. Church's particular challenge was to produce a grand landscape painting of an environment so limited in form, color, and living things. As the American art historian Gerald L. Carr writes, "By standards of its day, the composition was virtually abstract. Much was left to the imagination."A broadside was prepared to orient exhibition visitors to the painting. It described the scene in largely objective terms. Given its lack of figurative language, it may have been written by Church himself—Louis LeGrand Noble, by contrast, used much rhetorical flourish in his booklet for The Heart of the Andes. The broadside begins by orienting the viewer to the scene as a whole:The spectator is supposed to be standing on the ice, in a bay of the berg. The several masses are parts of one immense berg. 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 overhanging, precipitous ice; to the right is a part of the upper surface of the berg. To that succeeds an 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.
The Icebergs' play of light is highly detailed, with the afternoon sun somewhere at left casting shadows in blues, purples, and pinks, and the ice and water interacting in complex reflections, especially by the grotto. The viewer's eye is less likely to move vertically, from foreground to background, as it would in most landscape paintings, than to zig-zag. The likely starting point, the ship's mast, seems to point to the boulder and grotto at right, which in turn is oriented toward the large iceberg dominating the background. The boulder and ice around the grotto are painted with impasto, while Church otherwise conceals his brushstrokes. This more turbulent area with its variety of color creates a "material play between surface and depth", according to art historian Jennifer Raab.A boulder rests on the ice shelf above the grotto and stains the ice a rust color. It serves as a reminder that the iceberg once made contact with land, and stands as a reference to the geological notions of the day, such as Louis Agassiz's theory of the ice age, and Charles Lyell's theory of "continental lift". The general topic of unusually placed ("erratic") boulders was a matter of significant debate at the time. Art historian Timothy Mitchell writes that "The Icebergs is an exultant tribute to time's slow changes. But ... the scientific ideas that informed The Icebergs have long since been discounted by geologists and forgotten by the public. As a consequence, [the painting's] association with the geological process is often overlooked."The shapes in the ice sometimes form profiles of human-like faces, most pronounced in the repoussoir of ice on the left. As described by Carr, there are also intentional "vague humanoid profiles" on the right, "skull-like" ice blocks in the foreground, and a "floating ice-'siren'" near the grotto. In the foreground, melted water is a light blue, and at upper left a small waterfall deposits water into a patch of emerald beneath. Church observed that freshly frozen water within the cracks of icebergs produced a striking blue color; these veins of sapphire are illustrated at left. In the distance, the largest iceberg shows old waterlines, indicating its continuing ascent, and the foreground appears wetter, having risen from the ocean more recently. Church's signature is on the block of ice to the left of the mast, which was painted in later, and may be seen to form a crucifix. Carr notes that the water level in the grotto is not consistent with that of the rest of the painting.
Iceberg Church in Charles Lyell Alexander von Humboldt Kosmos John Ruskin John Raab impasto The Heart of the Andes ship's mast ice age repoussoir broadside iceberg Louis Agassiz