The endeavor and its failure offered a narrative of man’s struggle against nature, the tragic romance and heroism of exploration, and the overwhelming power of a landscape alien to the British public.įrederic Edwin Church, The Icebergs, 1861, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Norma and Lamar Hunt, 1979.28 The search for Franklin over the course of nearly 30 rescue missions better mapped the Canadian coastline and led to the eventual discovery of a Northwest Passage, but it also left a lasting legacy in the cultural imagination of Victorian Britain. In some of the most sensational findings, examinations of remains offered potential evidence of cannibalism. Their findings suggested that the crew succumbed to hypothermia, starvation, lead poisoning, exposure, and disease. The British Admiralty launched several search parties over the subsequent decades, recovering artifacts and remains from the doomed expedition. Of the 129 men who began the expedition, none survived. The rest made for the Canadian mainland but were never heard from again.
The ships became icebound in 1847 in the Victoria Strait and were abandoned in April 1848 after nearly two dozen officers and men, including Franklin, perished in the cold. Franklin embarked in 1845 with two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, on his third attempt to discover the Northwest Passage, a sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Canadian Arctic. NOT HERE: THE WHITE NORTH HAS THY BONES AND THOU, HEROIC SAILOR-SOUL, ART PASSING ON THINE HAPPIER VOYAGE NOW TOWARD NO EARTHLY POLE.įranklin’s doomed expedition was the source of public fascination in the late 19th century and continues to shape our perception of Arctic exploration to this day. Julian Charrière’s work Towards No Earthly Pole draws its title from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s epitaph in Westminster Abbey, London, for Sir John Franklin, the British explorer lost in an ill-fated expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Copyright the artist VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany Courtesy of the artist DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, Berlin Galerie Tschudi, Zuoz Sean Kelly, New York and Sies+Höke, Düsseldorf. By the time he died in 1900 he was a forgotten artist.Julian Charrière, Towards No Earthly Pole, 2019. His success began to wane in the 1870s and in 1880, suffering badly from rheumatism, he abandoned the large format and concentrated on decorating his house and depicting its appearance under different climatic conditions in small oil sketches. In 1860 Church, by then at the peak of his career, married Isabel Carnes and bought a plot of land overlooking the Hudson River, where he built Olana, a Persian-style country mansion where he spent his last years.
His travelling companion Reverend Louis Legrand Noble, Thomas Cole’s biographer, published an account of the expedition in After Icebergs with a Painter (1861). He visited the Labrador Peninsula, Newfoundland and painted several iceberg landscapes. In 1859 Church exchanged the tropical regions for the distant North. The showing of his painting of The Niagara Falls (Washington, Corcoran Gallery of Art) in 1857 in New York, London and other European cities earned him a reputation as the great American painter. He also made several visits to the Niagara Falls, another of the places of pilgrimage for painters of the time. The sketches he produced during his travels gave rise to some of the most memorable paintings of the Cayambe, Cotopaxi and Chimborazo volcanoes. Following in Humboldt’s footsteps, he made two trips to South America in spring 1853 and in 1857.
Cosmos taught him the harmonious unity of the universe, which Church translated into grandiose works combining broad panoramas with an almost scientific study of the details. The writings of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) would have a determining influence on Church’s work. His exhibition at the American Art Union in 1847 established him as one of the most promising young artists of the day. In 1845 he made his debut at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, of which he later became a member and where his works were shown continuously throughout his career. Little by little, the theories of John Ruskin, from whom Church learned that a thorough study of nature could reveal the essential truths of the world, distanced him from the moralistic and epic landscapes of his master. Church was the first student of Thomas Cole, the father of the Hudson River School, who instilled in him his allegorical and majestic vision of the American scenery, which is already apparent in the young painter’s earliest landscapes of New England.
0 kommentar(er)
