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Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH (1826-1900) Study for...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:35,000.00 - 350,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH (1826-1900) Study for...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH
(1826-1900)
Study for the "The Icebergs"
oil on paperboard mounted on canvas
8 x 13 in. (20.6 x 33.1 cm)
painted circa 1860 <p> Estimate: $250,000-$350,000 <p> Provenance
Edward Eberstadt and Sons, New York Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York, 1980 Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland,1982 <p> Exhibited
Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, Frederic Edwin Chruch: The Icebergs, 1980, no. 41 (illustrated as Study for The Icebergs) New York, Kennedy Galleries, Inc., A Kennedy Galleries Selection of American Art from Public and Private Collectors, 1981, no. 8 (illustrated) Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Art Center; Omaha, Joslyn Museum of Art, Nineteenth Century American Landscape Paintings: Selections from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, October 29, 1982-June 19, 1983, no. 9 (illustrated) Rome, Musei Vaticani; Lugano, Villa Malpensata, Maestri Americani della Collezione Thyssen-Bornemisza ,1983-1984, no. 8 (illustrated) Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art; Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts; Denver, CO, The Denver Art Museum; San Antonio, Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute; New York, IBM Gallery of Arts and Sciences; San Diego, San Diego Museum of Art; Palm Beach, The Society of the Four Arts, American Masters: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, October 28, 1984-April 13, 1986, no. 8 (illustrated) Kobe, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art; Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum; Tokyo, The Bunkamura Museum of Art; Hiroshima, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Two Hundred Years of American Paintings from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, January 5-August 25, 1991, no. 9 London, Tate Britain; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880, February 21-November 17, 2002, p. 180, no. 59 (illustrated, p. 180, as Icebergs and Wreck in Sunset) <p> Literature
Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting, London, 1986, pp. 97-99, no. 17 (illustrated, p. 97, as Icebergs and Wreck in Sunset) <p> This painting will be included in Gerald Carr's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's oil paintings, sponsored by Berry-Hill Galleries. <p> The present picture is a studio preparation of circa mid-1860 for Frederic Church's ten-foot-wide studio painting, The Icebergs , 1861 (fig. 1). One of his largest works, The Icebergs was the principal product of a six-week journey to coastal Newfoundland and Labrador that Church undertook with the Rev. Louis Legrand Noble in mid-1859.1 Twenty months later, in April 1861, just after the outbreak of the American Civil War, the completed canvas made its debut at the refurbished Goupil/Knoedler Gallery in New York. Coordinate with the unveiling, D. Appleton and Co. of New York published Noble's book narrative of the Canadian voyage, After Icebergs with a Painter; the volume was garnished by five tinted interior illustrations and a playful tinted frontispiece, all adapted from Church's sketches. At that time, one of Church's studio or field sketches of icebergs also could be seen at the sculptor Launt Thompson's quarters at the Tenth Street Studio Building on Broadway.2 Subsequently, to Dodworth's Academy of New York in January 1862, and to the Troy, NY, Athenaeum the next month, both on the eve of The Icebergs second display in Boston, Church sent a painted study (or studies) of icebergs.3 Hence, from the start, he enlisted various transcriptive and composed arctic scenes of small sizes by him in the presentation strategy for his large painting. <p> By the 1860s, Church's contemporaries recognized his "scientific bias." One of them wrote that if transport were available, he would navigate the moon and planets.4 Although a naturalist by disposition, Church was not what we would term a naturalist-artist. Instead he customarily assumed the broader roles of artist-explorer and artist-geographer. During the nineteenth century, science was regarded as a mode of thought and its findings as historic events. Church agreed with, indeed he exemplified, this view. In practice, he was a disciple as much as a pioneer. He generally followed thinly tracked paths in his travels, venturing where select few persons had preceded. He regarded prior explorer-travelers and explorer-witnesses as heroic, and he believed that within his sphere of expertise, the fine arts, he could equal or surpass them. <p> Perilous exploits by polar precursors recent and historic, starting with Henry Hudson, inspired Church's northern voyage of 1859. His quarries were drifted icebergs calved from Greenland glaciers. Rightly fearing icebergs' stealth and destructiveness, oceanic voyagers of the period nonetheless were fascinated by ice islands' myriad sizes, shapes, and colors, and by their solitude and inevitable dissipation after traversing great distances. Church was attracted to them for kindred reasons, much as he was to magisterial Andean volcanoes and the aqueous frenzy of Niagara. His numerous field sketches of icebergs (most of them preserved at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York) are appropriately descriptive, albeit visually ravishing. His few extant studio preparations for the large Icebergs, for example the present work, however, are essentially impulsive with tragic or potential tragic inflections. Dwarfed by prismatic, frowning ice-escarpments, sailing vessels risk themselves in treacherous nearby waters, or - with the present study - have fallen prey to icebergs' inherent instabilities and/or mariners' misjudgments. <p> We are grateful to Dr. Gerald Carr for cataloguing this lot. <p> NOTES 1 The principal treatments are Gerald L. Carr, Introduction by David C. Huntington, Frederic Edwin Church: The Icebergs (Dallas, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and University of Texas Press, 1980); Peter Neary, "American Argonauts: Frederic Edwin Church and Louis Legrand Noble in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1859," in Larry McCann and Carrie MacMillan, eds., The Sea and Culture of Atlantic Canada, (Sackville, New brunswick, Centre for Canadian Studies, Mount Allison University, 1992), pp. 15-46; Gerald L. Carr, In Search of the Promised Land: Paintings by Frederic Edwin Church, exh. cat. (New York, Berry-Hill Galleries, and University Press of New England, 2000), pp. 76-85; Eleanor Jones Harvey and Gerald L. Carr, The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church's Arctic Masterpiece, exh. cat. (Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2002). 2 Proteus (Eugene Benson [(1839-1908]), "Art Intelligence," New York Commercial Advertiser, June 18, 1861, p. 2, noted Church's iceberg sketch at Thompson's studio, among the most accessible at the Tenth Street Studio Building (where Church also was headquartered). Believing it to be a plein-air study, Benson preferred the small work to the large Icebergs. 3 At least three New York press critics, Eugene Benson prominent among them, commented on Church's iceberg sketch shown at Dodworth's. A local writer for the Troy [New York] Times, February 3, 1982, p. 3, noticed Church's iceberg scene on display there, as he or she did Church's Oosisoak (1861; Private Collection), a portrait of arctic explorer Isaac Hayes' lead sled dog, also shown at Troy. 3 "Cotopaxi," Leader, New York, March 21, 1863, p. 1.
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