The Icebergs

Frederic Edwin Church

1861

Oil on canvas

Dallas Museum of Art

"The Icebergs" is Frederic Edwin Church's masterpiece. The seductively inviting colors, glowing subterranean light, and glossy, tactile surfaces of the icebergs attract the viewer's eye. Yet in reality, the scene is an inhospitable place filled with danger, as the broken mast in the foreground indicates. When it was first exhibited at a Civil War fundraising exhibition, critics hailed it as "the most splendid work of art that has yet been produced in this country." Both sides of the Atlantic thrilled to this dramatic scene, which was based on sketches made by the artist during a monthlong chartered boat trip in the North Atlantic, o