Magdalena Bay, View from the Tombs Peninsula, North of Spitsbergen: Effect of the Aurora Borealis

In the summer of 1839, while the French corvette La Recherche lay at anchor in Magdalena Bay, in the north-west of Spitsbergen, the sun never set. Biard was aboard with the scientific expedition, and so was Léonie d'Aunet, who later published an account of the voyage. On a small spit of land she came upon the graves of whalers from earlier centuries. She drew the place, and because it was missing from the large charts, the captain named it the Peninsula of the Graves.

The aurora over it could not be seen in those weeks of endless daylight. According to d'Aunet, the travellers saw the first northern lights of the year later on, crossing Lapland on the way home, and Biard put the two memories together in Paris. Under the pale lights a small group of castaways lies in the snow, all but one of them apparently dead, with wreckage in the ice behind. The canvas was shown at the Salon of 1841 and bought for King Louis-Philippe. From 1862 it hung in the rooms of a museum official at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and when it came back to the Louvre in 1936 it was labelled as the work of a Mademoiselle Biard.