Ironically, it was during a search for FranklinвЂ™s lost expedition that the Northwest passage was finally discovered. 13, art historian Diana Donald aptly summarizes the aim of ChurchвЂ™s arctic masterpiece: вЂњFor Church, the Arctic is the sublime dwelling-place of God, into which humans venture at their peril.вЂќ It is important to note that nineteenth-century understandings of landscape were largely shaped by the writings of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant on the concept of вЂњthe sublime,вЂќ which was characterized as a sense of greatness infused with terror, made beautiful by the viewerвЂ™s perception of distance and safety. The monumental painting was created and first exhibited in 1861, but two years later Church modified it to include a broken shipвЂ™s mast in the foreground as a reminder of the powerlessness of manвЂ“specifically, Franklin and his crewвЂ“in the face of the vast, inhospitable arctic landscape. The horrifying deaths of the Franklin men underscored the hostility of the untouched northern landscape, and many artists responded to the loss by introducing obvious allusions to danger in their arctic scenes.ДЇrederick Edwin ChurchвЂ™s luminous painting The Icebergs (in Artstor courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art) exemplifies this change in perception. While exploration of the Arctic was always known to be perilous, the disappearance of the Franklin Expedition affected the publicвЂ™s romanticized notions of the region, and the slow stream of increasingly somber discoveries kept the tragedy fresh in the minds of the British and American publics. Stranded and already weakened, they slowly succumbed to scurvy and starvation, ultimately resorting to cannibalizing their dead. A grim tale began to unfold through cumulative discoveries: months after setting sail, FranklinвЂ™s two ships, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, were trapped in sea ice and abandoned by the crew, who were believed to have been suffering from lead poisoning caused by poorly soldered food tins.

Between 18, a total of 20 expeditions from Great Britain and America set out in search of Franklin and his men. When Franklin did not return by 1848, search parties were dispatched and the mystery of the crewвЂ™s fate became a public concern. Departing England in May of 1845, 129 men led by Sir John Franklin sought to become the first expedition to traverse previously untraveled portions of the fabled Northwest Passage. The mid-century Franklin Exhibition had a profound effect on the way Europeans and Americans conceptualized the Arctic. Image and original data provided by the Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of Drawings EK Kane, an ice floe in the Polar Sea, 19th Century, British Museum.

Other more adventurous artists, such as Frederic Edwin Church and William Bradford,В joined exhibitions or chartered their own, delighting their audiences with icy landscapes of astonishing blues, purples, and golds. Many artists used explorersвЂ™ writings and drawings to shape their paintings and lithographs, such as the Arctic scene below from the Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of Drawings. Writers such as Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edgar Allen Poe brought the Arctic to life through fictional works. Rather, people were stimulated by the ideas and images of the North.вЂќ While the public enjoyed the firsthand records and sketches explorers published of their experiences in the Arctic,В it was the artistic and literary interpretations that truly captured their imagination and elevated arctic exploration to a national obsession in Great Britain and America. As Richard Bevis writes in Road to Egdon Heath: the Aesthetics of the Great in Nature, вЂњaccounts of expeditions offered no more emotional and imaginative sustenance than in Captain CookвЂ™s time the leaders did not create the arctic sublime that fascinated the public. However, official accounts of northern voyages were rather dry. Artists were similarly enamored, creating resplendent paintings that represented a sublime view of an Arctic that has gradually crumbled (or more accurately, melted) over the past century as global warming wreaks havoc on the icy seas.ДЄrctic exploration surged in the nineteenth century, as did the public appetite for news related to the North. The search was exceedingly treacherousвЂ“pack ice, the floating ice covering the sea, made arctic waters impassable throughout most of the year and explorers perished in harsh conditionsвЂ“but the danger and beauty of the unknown North enchanted an adventure-hungry public. The search for the Northwest passage, an arctic maritime route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, drove European exploration of the North for hundreds of years. Image and original data provided by the Dallas Museum of Art Frederic Edwin Church, The Icebergs, 1861.

Frederic church