The Voyage of the Icebergs
New Haven: Dallas Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2002. First. Hardcover. [7¾" - 9¾"] 96 pp.; blue cloth boards w/silver lettering on cover and spine; 41 color and 15 black and white illustrations. Frontispiece by Church, both endpapers with blue-toned iceberg sketches. Book, fine condition, dust jacket has pink stain inside spine and minor shelf wear.
The authors provides a detailed look at the cycle of fame, neglect, and resuscitation of both this masterwork of American art and Frederic Church's career. From the publisher: "Twelve days after the onset of the American Civil War in April 1861, Frederic Edwin Church, the most successful American landscape painter of his day, debuted his latest "Great Picture," a painting titled The North. Despite farorable reviews, the painting failed to find a buyer. Faced with this unexpected setback, Church added a broken mast to the foreground and changed the work's title to The Icebergs. He then shipped the painting to London, where it was finally sold to an English railroad magnate and subsequently disappeared from view for 116 years. The fortuitous rediscovery of The Icebergs in 1979 coincided with an upswing in popularity and acclaim accorded to American landscape painting. Its sale at auction for $2.5 million -- at the time the highest amount ever paid for an American painting, catalyzed the market for American art and helped revive the prestige of Church and the Hudson River School."
Jones was the Curator of American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art and later moved to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Carr is an authority on Frederic Church and consulting art historian for Berry-Hill Galleries in New York. . Fine / Very Good. Item #47
ISBN: 9780300095364
Price: $40.00