Winter isn't always white.
Before photographs were in color and widely available, there was keen interest in the sorts of images painted by Massachusetts' artist William Bradford. Something of an Arctic explorer, too, Bradford was a master at reproducing the colorful play of light on a canvas strewn with icebergs, barren islands, sailing ships and dark men.
In 1866, he painted "Sealers Crushed by Icebergs," a riveting tableau that fills an entire wall, like the screen at your local movie theater. Taking a story heard from Newfoundland sealers, he depicts chaos on the ice, a large sailing vessel lifted atop a floe, while another ship burns furiously at the horizon. In the foreground, desperate sealers leap across the ice to get themselves and their supplies into small boats.
It's easy to imagine the viewer lingering at the painting, studying each detail, filling in the story, determining that the sealers were too busy with their harvest to notice the deadly pack ice closing in, imagining what must have happened next, with each man feeling the horror of being stranded in a hell on ice, hoping that another sail in the far distance represents rescue.
In an era before the cinema, that's the reaction Bradford expected when he toured the painting, charging admission in both the United States and Great Britain, allowing the public to stand and stare and imagine.
"It made his career," says Sam Scott, associate curator of Maritime Art and History at the Peabody Essex Museum. The painting is also a key element of the PEM's new exhibition, "To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape," on view at the Salem museum until March 1.
It's the first time such a show has been mounted anywhere, according to Scott. To make it happen required chasing down and borrowing paintings by multiple artists, works housed in five countries, including places as diverse as the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, private collections, the Smithsonian and the PEM's own treasure rooms.
The paintings cover a period roughly from 1830 to 1930, a time when ordinary people had some idea what the polar regions looked like thanks largely to a small cadre of artists, men sometimes found at the side of the great explorers, like Cook, Byrd and Shackleton.
"For a long time," says Scott, "these were places that we thought of as unreachable." Even when they could be reached, as the paintings show, they were so vast that the closest thing "is very, very far away."
The artists were often courageous and always inventive and determined. The images they offered were miracles of light and color. "They are amazed by how colorful the environment is," Scott says.
A museum visitor will glide past an iceberg by American George Curtis, a floating diamond caught by the mist-clouded sun, each facet giving off a spectrum of subtle hues.
Elsewhere, Bradford reproduces the moment when a three-masted sailing vessel is caught in a sunset that seemingly coats the sea, the ice and Greenland's snow-covered mountains in fire.
British artist George Marston sees a dog team leaping excitedly at the otherworldly appearance of the Aurora Borealis, electric blue colors flashed against a night blue sky above a black-blue landscape.
Massive paintings like "Sealers Crushed" were done in a studio. The artists had been to the regions they were representing, but for the most part they relied on sketches, black-and-white photographs and even film to guide finished work done in more temperate locations.
Viewing many of the places depicted precluded anything else. It was too cold. Oil paints congealed. Watercolors froze solid. If you weren't careful, so did your fingers.
For a series of images, American David Abbey Paige was one of the few to beat this problem by using pastels, chalk, which did not freeze, allowing him to see and reproduce the fantastic halo of light created when the sun looms low over an endless Arctic icescape.
A hint of what all this meant to the artists is projected on the floor of the museum at the entrance to the exhibit. It is a quote from American Rockwell Kent, who stood at the Earth's extreme and declared, "Being here in this spot, now, is worth traveling a thousand miles for. Maybe we have lived only to be here now."
