Aurora Borealis

Church finished this in 1865, as the Civil War was ending, and its Northern audience did not read it only as a nature study. During the war, unusually strong auroras had appeared in American skies, and many took the eerie lights as a sign from God about the nation's fate. Here the aurora blazes over a frozen Arctic, above a ship locked in the pack ice at the foot of a black cliff. The scene came from the polar explorer Isaac Hayes, a friend who handed Church his sketches after returning from the far north in 1861. A tiny dogsled crosses the ice below, the one sign of life and the one hope of rescue in all that cold.