To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape by Samuel Scott from Antiques & Fine Art magazine

The polar landscape painting tradition in Western art belongs most appropriately to a period of one hundred years that begins in the 1830s and ends in the 1930s. The exploring expeditions of the eighteenth century introduced Western consciousness to the Arctic and the Antarctic, whetting the popular appetite for all things polar. For earlier generations, the North Pole was varyingly imagined as a region of the gods, a middle ground between life and death, and a hostile land where immutable natural forces challenged mankind's hubris. When the existence of a corresponding ice cap in the Southern hemisphere was established by the late-eighteenth-century voyages of Captain James Cook and others, it inherited these mythic associations, until nineteenth-century explorers and artists, inspired to make the arduous journey to these remote locales, tested and reshaped these images of polar space.

The concept of polar space as the site of heroic endeavor was fertile ground for landscape painters. They carefully composed the awesome power of the environment into a setting against which the presence of the cultural hero is projected. The landscape becomes set design and the ship – or occasionally other types of human constructions – the actor. The ship was a useful visual symbol because it represented not only a real physical object, but was culturally understood to embody the accomplishments of its commander, the cooperative effort of its crew, and by extension the cultural ambition of its country of origin. The polar regions were also a site of spiritual pilgrimage, where the elemental hand of God in the world was exposed.

In the nineteenth century, the value placed by science on personal observation was increasingly echoed by the emerging notion among landscape painters that their work should be done from nature. Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School were among the first American painters to receive critical acclaim for working in this mode. Frederic Church, especially, showed that what was artistically appropriate for the landscape within an easy journey from New York City also applied to the icy high latitudes of the Davis Strait. Artists increasingly joined scientific missions and officially sanctioned exploration to paint awe-inspiring landscapes.

The imaging of the polar environment resonated with both the Romantic and early modernist traditions of landscape painting. For artists like William Bradford and Frederic Edwin Church, who were striving to capture the sublime, the poles delivered epic natural forces against which to set the frailty of human existence. A nearly geometric reduction of a grand scene to its elemental qualities was typical of early modernists Rockwell Kent and Lawren Harris, who excelled in conveying the nature of the polar environments through their graphic attributes. For painters seeking new ways of seeing through painting, the polar landscape provided an austerity of space, purity of light, and an architectural setting well suited to their objectives.