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Aurora Borealis (1865)
Frederic Edwin Church.
The ship and sled team in this image belonged to Frederic Church's friend, polar explorer Dr. Isaac Hayes. In 1859, Church accompanied Hayes on an expedition to the Arctic, where he made the sketches for this painting. They returned from their voyage to find the country in the thick of the Civil War, and Hayes vowed in a rousing speech, "God willing, I trust yet to carry the flag of the great Republic, with not a single star erased from its glorious Union, to the extreme northern limits of the earth." Viewers understood Church's paintings of the northern lights as a symbol of the Union cause, a divine display for the northern states alone to see. |