Aurora Borealis
About the painting
Aurora Borealis is an 1865 painting by the American artist Frederic Edwin Church of the aurora borealis and the Arctic expedition of Isaac Israel Hayes. The painting measures 142.3 by 212.2 centimetres (56.0 in × 83.5 in) and is now owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
In the museum's words
Under a dark Arctic sky, polar explorer Isaac Israel Hayes's ship, the SS United States, lies frozen in the pack ice at the base of a looming cliff. The auroras above erupt in a cascade of eerie lights, while the dogsled implies the hope of rescue from this icy prison. Hayes and Frederic Church were friends, and upon Hayes's return from the Arctic in 1861, he gave Church his sketches as inspiration for this painting. When Hayes returned to New York, the country was in the thick of civil war and, in a rousing speech, he vowed that "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."
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Particulars
Meanwhile, in the life of Frederic Edwin Church
The whole life1863 · Membership
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1865
A journey to Jamaica after the loss
Still grief-stricken, Church, his wife and a young artist they had befriended travelled to Jamaica: he sketched while Isabel made a collection of pressed Jamaican ferns.
March 1865
His son and daughter die of diphtheria
The Churches’ first children, two-year-old Herbert and five-month-old Emma, both died of diphtheria. Other accounts give their ages as five and six.
1866
His son Frederic Joseph is born
The birth of Frederic Joseph began a new family for the Churches; he was followed by Theodore Winthrop (1869), Louis Palmer (1870) and Isabel Charlotte, nicknamed “Downie” (1871).
late 1867
The grand journey: Europe, Egypt, Beirut
That autumn Church and his family began the longest journey of his career: passing quickly through London and Paris, they sailed from Marseille to Alexandria — he did not visit the pyramids, perhaps afraid to leave his family alone — and via Jaffa reached Beirut, where they spent four months with American missionaries, among them David Stuart Dodge.
