Icebergs, Canada

Frederic Edwin Church's study sketches explore the dramatic forms of Arctic ice, rendered in ink with white gouache highlights on tan paper. Church, a leading Hudson River School painter, traveled to Newfoundland in 1859 to observe icebergs firsthand for his monumental oils. These rapid compositional studies capture the jagged profiles and massive scale of calved glacial forms against minimal horizons. The varied perspectives—close detail above, distant landscape below—demonstrate Church's working method: translating on-site observations into the panoramic, light-saturated canvases that defined American landscape painting in the mid-nineteenth century.