Aurora Borealis

Following the light across the canvas

The aurora occupies most of the upper half of the picture, yet its strongest colours gather towards the left and centre. A pale green-blue band folds back upon itself above the snowy heights. Farther right, long strokes rise in gold, orange and red. Their fine vertical divisions suggest curtains through which light is passing. The forms have enough definition to follow, but their softened edges make them seem capable of changing at any moment.

Within the arch lies a broad area of dark sky, relieved by small stars. This darkness gives the coloured rays their apparent brightness. It also separates them from the heavy outline of the land below. Church does not fill every part of the sky with equal activity: the quieter central space allows the eye to recognise the aurora’s overall shape before exploring its individual strands.

A separate pale beam ascends diagonally from the right horizon. It is straighter and more isolated than the curling light on the left. These two kinds of movement pull across the canvas, with the broad arch joining them. Below, the snow and ice pick up patches of cool blue-green and warm orange. Light links sky and ground without making their textures alike: the aurora is translucent, the land massive, and the broken ice sharp-edged.

Church’s own observations and Hayes’s journey

Church’s northern travels had taken him to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1859. The terrain in Aurora Borealis, however, came from material associated with Hayes’s 1860–61 expedition. Franklin Kelly explains that Church knew the explorer and had given him drawing lessons. The artist combined Hayes’s landscape material with an aurora study made from his own observations on Mount Desert Island in Maine. A subject drawn from distant exploration thus incorporated something Church had watched closer to home. ^[2]

Hayes’s published narrative, The Open Polar Sea, begins with the preparations for his departure from Boston in July 1860. His vessel, the schooner United States, depended on wind; a steam tug appears separately in the departure account. This distinction helps us read the two bare masts and rigging in Church’s picture as the equipment of a sailing vessel. The painting’s icebound ship represents a means of travel whose effectiveness changes sharply with its surroundings. ^[3]

In open water, sails can turn wind into progress. Among packed ice, the same vessel seems almost motionless, its upright spars measuring how small it is beside the cliff. Church places it low in the composition, leaving ample distance between its deck and the enormous atmospheric display. The contrast gives the scene a human scale without making the ship its dominant subject.

A landscape carried into print

Hayes’s book includes a plate entitled The Shores of the Polar Sea, identified as coming from a sketch by the explorer. Its mountain masses and receding coastline provide a useful comparison with the painted landscape. Labels beneath the illustration name features of the terrain, including Cape Lieber and Church Peak. In his narrative, Hayes explains the naming of Cape Lieber and a peak called Church’s Monument. These names preserve a personal connection between explorer and artist within an account of distant geography. ^[3]

The publication date matters: The Open Polar Sea appeared in 1867, two years after Church completed the painting. The printed illustration allows us to examine landscape material that had an earlier life as a sketch. It should not be treated as a book page Church copied in 1865. Kelly identifies the earlier sketch given to the artist as the source behind the terrain, and discusses the ship’s relationship to Hayes’s illustrated material. ^[2]

The plate and painting also direct attention differently. The illustration’s labels encourage us to locate and name individual features. Church’s canvas gives the sky far more space and lets coloured light cross the land. Even where a mountain’s outline invites comparison, the surrounding relationships have changed. Geographic information has become part of a composition whose principal movement passes overhead.

A historic photograph of a ship in ice

Another form of Arctic documentation appears in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s photograph [Ship in Ice, Greenland Expedition], attributed to Hayes and dated approximately 1859. It is an albumen silver print from a glass negative, presented as paired stereoscopic views. A vessel sits amid broken ice, its masts rising above the rough foreground. The photograph offers a useful comparison with Church’s use of a small ship to make the frozen setting intelligible. ^[4]

The museum’s approximate date does not identify this print as a record of one precise episode from the 1860–61 voyage, nor establish it as a model for Aurora Borealis. Its value here lies in the different way it presents a related subject. The paired views concentrate on the ship and the ice immediately surrounding it. Church makes a vessel part of a far larger prospect, where the sky supplies the picture’s strongest colour and most expansive movement.

Hayes’s description of a winter aurora

Chapter XVI of Hayes’s narrative contains an account under 6 January 1861 of an aurora seen during the expedition’s winter darkness. He describes walking among icebergs at the harbour’s mouth, with icebergs and a low black cloud before him. A sudden bright ray briefly lights the scene, then disappears. An arch subsequently develops across the sky. The account moves from an isolated flash to a more sustained display, with darkness becoming part of the experience rather than merely its background. ^[3]

Hayes attends closely to colour. Red predominates in his description, accompanied by blue, yellow, green, orange and violet. He follows changes in brightness, the appearance of stars and the effect of illumination on the surrounding landscape. His writing is especially useful because it describes a sequence. The phenomenon changes while he watches, and his reader encounters it through successive moments. ^[3]

The same passage makes winter darkness a practical condition of observation. Hayes remarks that morning and evening must be distinguished by the clock because their light is so similar. His brilliant display occurs near noon, although he has been finding his way among rough ice in darkness. The account changes what we might assume from Church’s dark sky: an Arctic scene need not belong to ordinary evening hours merely because it looks like night. The painting does not supply a clock, but the narrative helps us imagine a different daily rhythm. ^[3]

Hayes also reaches beyond description into imaginative comparison, invoking burning Troy, classical constellations and the fires of Vesuvius. These passages belong to the explorer’s literary account, not to a key identifying those stories in the painting. They reveal how an observer could join precise attention to colour with associations of spectacle, danger and ancient history. ^[3]

Church’s canvas gathers several kinds of light into one arrangement. We can see an isolated ray at the right while the arch stretches above the mountains, and coloured reflections remain visible below. Kelly connects the right-hand streak with Hayes’s description of the initial flash. The comparison helps explain the detail without requiring a lighthouse or another artificial source at the horizon. It also shows how prose and painting can handle time differently: the written encounter unfolds, while the canvas holds its visual contrasts together. ^[2]

Colour, atmosphere and modern science

Modern science explains auroras through the interaction of the solar wind with Earth’s magnetic environment. Charged particles energise gases in the upper atmosphere, which release light. NASA’s account associates oxygen with red and green, and nitrogen with blue and pink; the resulting colours depend on factors including the gas, altitude and particle energy. This explains why northern lights can appear in several colours rather than as a single uniform glow. ^[5]

That explanation supplies context for today’s viewer, rather than a measurement of the sky Church painted. His canvas is an artistic arrangement, and its coloured passages cannot establish the altitude of a particular atmospheric emission. The more immediate question is how the colours work together. Pale green folds appear close to the snow, warmer rays rise above the dark arch, and a cool beam opens the distant right. Their distribution turns a complex spectacle into a readable composition.

The distinction between observation and a later trigger is equally useful. Smithsonian research notes identify Church’s surviving 1860 Maine aurora study, while recording the difficulty of locating a proposed study of the 1864 display. The known earlier observation gives us something firmer than a supposition about an undocumented sketch. A painting can respond to contemporary events while also drawing upon material accumulated years before. ^[6]

The ship and the small dogsled

Close looking changes the apparent emptiness of the foreground. Below and to the right of the schooner, a small dogteam and sled cross the ice. They are easily missed when the eye follows the sky. Their dark forms introduce a low horizontal movement beneath the ship’s vertical masts. The Smithsonian’s collection label reads the dogsled as a sign of possible rescue, adding hope to the vessel’s confinement. That is an interpretation of the painted detail rather than identification of a documented rescue. ^[1]

The two groups also give the viewer different measures of distance. The ship is small, but its masts remain distinct; the dogteam is smaller still. Behind them, ridges climb towards the pointed peak. The picture repeatedly asks us to compare forms whose sizes are difficult to grasp on their own. Familiar equipment makes the immense terrain easier to imagine, while the surrounding darkness preserves its uncertainty.

The foreground contains angular fragments and low ridges of ice rather than a smooth white floor. These interruptions make the route across it seem less simple than the broad view first suggests. The luminous snow belongs to the same setting that restricts the ship. Beauty and practical difficulty occupy the canvas together, even though no dramatic struggle fills the foreground.

Civil War readings and the December 1864 display

The date 1865 places Aurora Borealis at the end of the American Civil War. Kelly discusses a conspicuous aurora on 23 December 1864 and reports its interpretation by many northerners as an omen of Union victory. The Smithsonian’s collection account likewise connects spectacular northern lights with wartime hopes and fears. These readings situate the painting within the responses its subject could evoke for a contemporary audience. ^{[2] [1]}

The historical context does not require every coloured ray to represent a political force. The canvas gives viewers a stranded ship, a vast frozen setting and a sky illuminated by an extraordinary event. Such contrasts can sustain associations with danger, endurance and hope. The Civil War interpretation gains specificity from the date and reported reception of auroras, while the visible scene remains open to attention as a landscape.

This also leaves room for the quieter evidence of Hayes’s expedition and Church’s study of light. Those sources explain how particular forms entered the picture. A wartime reading explains one way the completed subject could acquire broader meaning. Keeping both in view makes the painting richer: its natural details need not disappear when we consider its historical setting.

An electrical metaphor in later interpretation

The Smithsonian’s 2020 Humboldt exhibition offered another reading of the light. Its interpretive text likens the curling auroras to the broken transatlantic cables associated with Church’s friend and patron Cyrus Field. It connects the image’s electrical phenomenon with the promise of communication across an ocean. This is a modern curatorial interpretation, whose argument brings the atmospheric spectacle into conversation with nineteenth-century technological ambition. ^[7]

The comparison gives particular emphasis to the contrast between the trapped vessel and the mobile light. A ship must negotiate a material surface; the aurora seems to travel freely through the sky. The metaphor can sharpen our awareness of that contrast without becoming a compulsory explanation for every detail. Different historical questions direct attention towards different parts of the same composition.

Commission and London presentation

Deborah Chotner Rindge’s chronology records Aurora Borealis as a commission from William T. Blodgett. It was exhibited at McLean’s Gallery in London from June to August 1865, alongside Chimborazo of 1864 and Cotopaxi of 1862. The grouping brought an Arctic night into the same exhibition as two Andean subjects. They offered markedly different landscapes within Church’s continuing exploration of distant scenery and dramatic light. ^[8]

Comparison with The Icebergs also clarifies the character of this northern painting. In the earlier canvas, great sculptural ice formations dominate the view. Here the terrain lies beneath a larger atmospheric event, and the ship provides a concentrated human presence. Looking between them reveals how much the organisation of light can change our experience of a frozen landscape. One invites examination of massive surfaces; the other carries the eye upwards from small signs of travel into a sky in motion.