Aurora Borealis (painting)

Background

Aurora Borealis is based on two separate sketches. 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.

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."

Description and influences

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Exhibition

Completed in New York that winter, Aurora Borealis was exhibited publicly in London in 1865 as a triumvirate with two paintings of Ecuadoran volcanos Cotopaxi (his 1862 painting of an eruption) and Chimborazo (his 1864 reprise of the dormant mountain that had been the subject of his 1858 masterwork Heart of the Andes.

Reception and legacy

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.

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.

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."