Aurora Borealis

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Aurora Borealis: Frederic Edwin Church

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Frederic Edwin Church Oil Painting - Aurora Borealis

Keywords: Aurora, Borealis

Work Overview: Aurora Borealis
Artist Frederic Edwin Church
Year 1865
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 142.3 cm × 212.2 cm (56 in × 83.5 in)
Location Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Aurora Borealis is an 1865 painting by Frederic Edwin Church of the aurora borealis and the Arctic expedition of Dr. Isaac Hayes. The painting measures 56 × 84 1/2 in. (142.3 × 212.2 cm) and is now owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Aurora Borealis is based on two separate sketches.[3] The first incident was an aurora witnessed by Church's pupil, the Arctic explorer Isaac I. Hayes. Hayes provided a sketch and description of the aurora borealis display he witnessed one January evening. Coinciding with Hayes' furthest northern movement into what he named Cape Leiber, the aurora borealis appeared over the peak.[4]

Describing the event, Hayes wrote:

"The light grew by degrees more and more intense, and from irregular bursts it settled into an almost steady sheet of brightness... The exhibition, at first tame and quiet, became in the end startling in its brilliancy. The broad dome above me is all ablaze... The colour of the light was chiefly red, but this was not constant, and every hue mingled in the fierce display. Blue and yellow streamers were playing in the lurid fire; and, sometimes starting side by side from the wide expanse of the illuminated arch, they melt into each other, and throw a ghostly glare of green into the face and over the landscape. Again this green overrides the red; blue and orange clasp each other in their rapid flight; violet darts tear through a broad flush of yellow, and countless tongues of white flame, formed of these uniting streams, rush aloft and lick the skies."

The iconography of the painting suggested personal and nationalistic references. The peak in the painting had been named Mount Church during Hayes's expedition. Aurora Borealis incorporated details of Hayes' ship, drawn from a sketch he brought back upon returning from his expedition. Contrasting with his earlier works The North and The Icebergs (1861), the intact ship highlights Hayes' achievements in navigating this space, as well as the state of the nation in navigating this contentious historical moment. Presenting the ship's safe passage through the eerie experience, Church suggested optimism for the future with a tiny light shining out from the ship's window.[6]

Charles Millard describes Church's paintings as "large in scale and size, sharply horizontal in format" and "...dramatic in subject, but yielding in execution, and tend to exploit both value contrast and continuous tonal transition." Church's works, including Aurora Borealis, were completed using small touches of pigment built together through thin applications, leaving the viewer unaware of fracture between strokes. These works are also built around the tones of "ochre, brown, gray going to blue or green, and green" at the expense of the full value of color.[7]

Church's landscape conformed to the aesthetic principles of the picturesque, as propounded by the British theorist William Gilpin, which began with a careful observation of nature that was then enhanced by particular notions about composition and harmony.

Aurora Borealis and some of Church's other landscape works, such as Morning in the Tropics (1877), are examples of Church's use of luminism. Characteristics of luminism are: a diffuse light, a hazy atmosphere, and a calm view of the land. The luminism painting style is an aspect of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, of which Frederic Edwin Church was a part, and is associated with American landscapes in the 19th century.[8]

The theory of British critic John Ruskin was also an important influence on Church. Ruskin's Modern Painters was a five-volume treatise on art that was, according to American artist Worthington Whittredge, "in every landscape painter's hand" by mid-century.[9] Ruskin emphasized the scrutiny of nature, and he viewed art, morality, and the natural world as spiritually unified. Following this theme, the painting displays the landscape in detail at all scales, from the intricate foliage, birds, and butterflies in the foreground to the all-encompassing portrayal of the natural environments studied by Church. The presence of the cross suggests the peaceful coexistence of religion with the landscape.

Created at the end of the American Civil War, Aurora Borealis (1865) was believed to depict the portent of a simultaneously triumphant and desolate Union victory, its meaning amplified in relation to later works, including The After Glow (1867) and other works.[10]

Aurora Borealis (1865) is considered by some scholars to be best understood within a wider polyptych or multi-paneled grouping; the meanings of the paintings multiply in relation to each other and the harrowing period of American history during which they were created.[6]

Aurora Borealis (1865) was associated with Rainy Season in the Tropics (1866) for two reasons. First, the two paintings marked the completion of the arctic-tropical sequence created with The Heart of the Andes (1859) and The North also known as The Icebergs (1861). These pairings drew together popular attention on exploration of the arctic North and the tropical South. The second association between Aurora Borealis and Rainy Season in the Tropics was established through their compositions and "in their luminosity," where each suggested a "renewed optimism in natural and historic events."

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This year marks the sesquicentennial anniversary of the end of the American Civil War, a conflict that Abraham Lincoln called a “mighty scourge.” It was one of the most poignant periods in U.S. history, laying bare political, economic, social, and moral divergence between Northern and Southern states. The cause of the divergence that led to war was slavery [e.g., McPherson, 1988, chap. 3]—an institution that, by the 19th century, had been effectively abolished in the North but remained firmly entrenched in the South.

War erupted in 1861 after a confederacy of Southern states declared secession from the Union of the United States. When the war finally ended in 1865, the Union had prevailed, and afterward, slavery was abolished throughout the United States. This outcome was obtained at the cost of 750,000 American lives and substantial destruction, especially in the South [e.g., Gugliotta, 2012].

In 1865, the same year the war ended, the American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church unveiled Aurora Borealis (pictured above), a dramatic and mysterious painting that can be interpreted in terms of 19th century romanticism, scientific philosophy, and Arctic missions of exploration. Aurora Borealis can also be viewed as a restrained tribute to the end of the Civil War—a moving example of how science and current events served as the muses of late romantic artists [e.g., Carr, 1994, p. 277; Avery, 2011; Harvey, 2012].

Background and Style
A portrait photograph of Frederic Edwin Church taken between 1855 and 1865. Credit: Library of Congress, Brady-Handy Collection, Washington, D. C.
A portrait photograph of Frederic Edwin Church taken between 1855 and 1865. Credit: Library of Congress, Brady-Handy Collection, Washington, D. C.
Frederic Edwin Church was born in 1826 in Hartford, Conn. His family’s wealth enabled him to pursue his interest in art from an early age. When Church was 18, a family friend introduced him to Thomas Cole, a prominent landscape painter who had founded an important American romantic artistic movement known as the Hudson River School [e.g., Howart, 1987; Warner, 1989].

With Cole as his tutor, Church learned to paint landscapes in meticulous detail, emphasizing natural light. Other prominent artists within the Hudson River School included Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, but Church became perhaps the school’s most technically accomplished artist [e.g., Huntington, 1966]. In 1849, Church became the youngest artist ever elected as an associate of the National Academy of Design. Public showings of Church’s major works were often accompanied by advance publicity and fanfare.

Church was well known for painting large panoramas with waterfalls, sunsets, and high mountains—scenes that appealed to many Americans of the 19th century. The United States was, at the time, seemingly destined for territorial expansion. And although the vastness of untamed wilderness was slowly diminishing, daily life for most Americans remained relatively close to nature. The majority of Americans lived in the rural countryside and worked on farms. Even for those living in cities, the starry beauty of the nighttime sky had not yet been completely obscured.

The Influence of Humboldt
Church’s attentive depiction of nature on canvas was inspired in no small part by Alexander von Humboldt, the great Prussian geographer and explorer, who promoted a holistic view of the universe as one giant interacting system. In the early 19th century, Humboldt was a celebrity, and it is noteworthy that Church’s personal library included a copy of Humboldt’s masterwork Kosmos [e.g., Baron, 2005]. A multivolume treatise, Kosmos covers an amazing diversity of subjects, many of them scientific but some also historical and cultural. There is even a section devoted to aurorae, which Humboldt understood (correctly) to be related to magnetic storms.

Like other romantic intellectuals of the 19th century, Humboldt believed that one could obtain inspiration and understanding of one’s place in the world by studying the cosmos and reflecting on its grandeur [e.g., Walls, 2009]. Humboldt devoted an entire chapter in Kosmos to landscape painting, which he said “must be a result at once of a deep and comprehensive reception of the visible spectacle of external nature, and of [an] inward process of the mind” [Humboldt, 1850, part I.II]. In other words, landscape painting can facilitate a contemplation of nature that Humboldt believed could be personally beneficial.

After the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, it would have been reasonable to predict Union victory in the American Civil War [e.g., McPherson, 1988, chap. 21]. In that same year Church began working on Aurora Borealis, assembling elements taken from different sources to form what is essentially a fictional scene [e.g., Truettner, 1968]. The painting, oil on canvas, is physically large: 143 × 212 centimeters. From an elevated and exhilarating perspective, we look out over a far northern, nighttime scene. Auroral light casts a pale illumination across a still world of barren mountains and a broad expanse of frozen sea. In the foreground, we see a small boat and a man with a dog-drawn sled.

Church never saw the landscape presented in Aurora Borealis. As it happened, Church taught the arctic explorer Isaac Israel Hayes the fine arts of drawing and painting. Church and Hayes became close friends, and the landscape in Aurora Borealis is based on drawings made by Hayes during an 1860 expedition [e.g., Truettner, 1968]. The ice-locked boat is Hayes’s schooner, the United States [Hayes, 1867, p. 211]. The mountains are a depiction of those on Ellesmere Island, the northernmost land in Canada. And in the background is a sharp peak that Hayes called Church Peak (81.26°N, 65.62°W), named in honor of his friend and art instructor [Hayes, 1867, p. 351] .

With respect to the auroral light depicted in Aurora Borealis, Church might very well have recalled the brilliant displays of aurora borealis that came before the war in August and September 1859. These were caused by solar and magnetic storm events that are now collectively called the Carrington event [e.g., Clark, 2007].

The 1859 aurorae were widely reported in newspapers and seen across the United States, even in the South, where some observers interpreted them as portending war [e.g., Love, 2014]. Still, it is worth recognizing that Church would have seen aurorae many times while living in New England and New York and during his trips to Labrador. Indeed, the shape of the auroral arc in Aurora Borealis is taken from a sketch that Church made in September 1860 while visiting Maine [e.g., Truettner, 1968, note 36].

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“Aurora Borealis,” Frederic Edwin Church, 1865. Aurora silently illuminates a barren and frozen world of mountains, a schooner locked in sea ice, and a man with a dog-drawn sled in this richly symbolic landscape painting. Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY
This year marks the sesquicentennial anniversary of the end of the American Civil War, one of the most poignant periods in U.S. history.

USGS scientist Jeffrey J. Love recently published an article that discusses an example of how science and nature may have been used to pay tribute to the war’s conclusion. The article is published in the American Geophysical Union journal Eos.

Love discusses the painting, “Aurora Borealis,” which was unveiled by the great American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church just before the war ended in 1865. The article provides an analysis of the artist’s career and the painting’s symbolic significance.

Exploring the Painting’s Meaning

It is a dramatic and mysterious painting that can be interpreted in terms of 19th century romanticism, scientific philosophy and Arctic missions of exploration.

There are various interpretations of the painting’s underlying message in relation to the war. For example, some have suggested that the drapery of light in “Aurora Borealis” represents the American flag. If so, then it has been unfurled across a cold and barren landscape, not in extravagant celebration of the war’s anticipated end, but in subdued and somber recognition of the reality of postwar desolation and an uncertain future.

Aurora Phenomena

Aurora borealis occur in the northern hemisphere and are often called “northern lights.” In the southern hemisphere, the same phenomena are called aurora australis or “southern lights.” They are often seen during magnetic storms, which are caused by a dynamic interaction between the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field.

Intense magnetic storms can interfere with radio communications, GPS systems, satellites and directional drilling for oil and gas. Large geomagnetic storms can even interfere with the operations of electric power grids, causing blackouts.

USGS Science

The USGS operates a network of specially designed observatories that provide real-time data on magnetic storm conditions.

Hungry for some science, but you don’t have time for a full-course research plate? Then check out USGS Science Snippets, our snack-sized science series that focuses on the fun, weird, and fascinating stories of USGS science.

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Frederic Edwin Church

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