Something short and sweet to end the year on! At the end of October, I presented a paper at the Hull Maritime Museum as part of a symposium organised in association with the Turner & the Whale exhibition, curated by my supervisor and another one of his PhD students. This paper has now been uploaded onto the History of Art portal at the University of York, so I thought I would share it with you here…
In this paper I explored the depiction of ice in mid-19th century Hull Maritime and Norwegian Romantic painting – a little before my normal period of expertise. Through artistic and arctic exploration, and in the retelling of stories, the depiction of ice bore the same romanticised depiction – angular, dramatic, and cathedral-like in its construction. Here, I compared and contrasted two paintings of the Arctic whaling expeditions by John Ward and James H. Wheldon, with two paintings by Norwegian artists Johan C. Dahl and Peder Balke, observing the differences and similarities in their approach to icebergs and glaciers, respectively.
So here’s a little bit of ice, to give that wintery experience of ice and snow, that some of us are unfortunately lacking! Also, as this is the final post of 2017, here’s to a much more prolific 2018…
Isabelle Gapp 