Sketches of a Man's Head and Floating Iceberg, Canada

Frederic Edwin Church, the leading American landscape painter of the nineteenth century, traveled to Newfoundland and Labrador in the summer of 1859 to study icebergs firsthand. These working sketches on paper reveal Church's method: rapid notational drawings capturing both geological forms and human scale. The man's head studies explore light and shadow, while the iceberg sketches document the massive frozen structures that fascinated Church as subjects of sublime natural power. These studies informed his monumental oil paintings, which combined meticulous observation with romantic vision to establish Church as a master of the Hudson River School.