Die Eisberge

Church painted this in 1861, the year the American Civil War broke out, and the timing shaped its whole life. He'd sailed up past Newfoundland two years earlier to get close to the ice, and he meant this vast canvas to be a patriotic spectacle. But with the country now at war he couldn't find a buyer at home, so he shipped it across the Atlantic to London and there added the broken ship's mast you see in the foreground, a small wreck lodged among the blue and green cliffs of ice. A Manchester businessman bought it and hung it in his country house, and then it simply vanished from view. The estate changed hands for over a century and became in turn a hospital and an orphanage, the painting hanging dusty on a back stairway the whole time, no one aware of what it was. It surfaced again only in 1979, when the house was cleared and the canvas went to auction. It sold for two and a half million dollars, a record then for any American painting, and the anonymous buyer gave it to the Dallas Museum of Art.