O Iceberg (The Iceberg) - Frederic Edwin Church

O Iceberg (The Iceberg) - Frederic Edwin Church
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Estados Unidos
OST - 71x99 - 1891

Nine years before his death in 1900 and stricken with arthritis in his painting hand, Church again painted an iceberg, one of his last paintings. The Iceberg (1891) is a simpler composition than his 1861 picture. Describing The Iceberg, Huntington notes the changes in Church's style and outlook: "Church was seldom more charming than in this late painting. Gone is the compulsive striving to say the last word about his subject, the passion to know and master the universe. The later painting seems, rather, the pensive memory of an experience.... The physically inactive man of sixty-five seems to be content to stand still and not to say, but only to suggest all. He was no longer moving forward 'with the momentum of mankind', impelled by a national enthusiasm of the hour. The Iceberg of 1891 is the lonely confrontation of a lonely man who sees himself on that ship of yesterday sailing for safety from a strangely drifting, isolated and indifferent white creature of the elements.... Instead of 'restlessness' and 'exhilaration' and 'wild ungovernableness', there is quiet beauty and mystery. There is no world prophecy here but instead the introspection of a man cut off from his time, yet somehow still believing in himself." Church was pleased with the painting, writing to a friend that it was "the best I ever painted and the truest". It is now in the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art.