Haunted Polar Bears: Art & the Arctic
“Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised”
In Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, the act of venturing beyond city limits requires a firearm. This is the reality of humans settling in the natural habitat of the polar bear, one of the world’s largest carnivores. Though instances are rare, polar bears will attack and will kill people, thus a rifle or a flare gun is a necessary deterrent within the arctic circle. Humans residing here have adapted and take careful precautions to safely coexist with this intimidating marine mammal. Such is life at the edge of the world. Suffice to say it’s not usually a problem in universities in the UK.
Undertaking an exam in Royal Holloway, 1980’s
© Royal Holloway, University of London.
Despite this, two polar bears in particular cast a pall over the students at Royal Holloway College, London, who believe a painting of the animals is cursed. As the myth goes, a student seated next to the painting during an exam in the College Picture Gallery looked directly into the polar bears eyes, went into a trance and scrawled ‘the polar bears made me do it’ onto their paper before committing suicide at their desk. There is no evidence of such a death ever occurring on campus, but the students latched onto the tale regardless. Fears that the unlucky student sat next to the painting during an exam will fail are abound even now, implying that Royal Holloway students find academic failure quite literally a fate worse than death. Sanctions were taken. When the dread reached fever pitch in the 1970’s, one girl refused to take the exam while sitting next to the bears, and the harried invigilator threw the largest cloth she could find over the piece to cover it. This happened to be a Union Jack. Since then it has become tradition for the painting to be covered up with the flag during exam season, lest the gaze of the polar bears cause an innocent student to forget all their revision - or worse.
I wouldn’t blame them. If nothing else the image is certainly distracting, pretty dark stuff even by the famously morbid Victorian standards.
The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, 1837, Sir Edwin Landseer
Man Proposes, God Disposes is an 1864 oil painting by Edwin Landseer, the famed English painter who is known mainly for animal portraiture. Described by Queen Victoria as ‘very good looking although rather short’, Landseer was a cut above your average Etsy pet portraitist. His works evoked sentiment or morality upon his anatomically-accurate animal subjects, staging them in moments of humanity that bordered on anthropomorphism. For instance, the heartbreaking portrait The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner depicts a sheep dog resting its head on a wooden coffin in an act of unspeakable grief. Landseer also began the myth that Saint Bernard’s carried barrels of brandy round their necks to revive stricken travellers, thanks to his 1820 work Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveler. This is tragically untrue. He is also responsible for creating the four bronze lions which now stand sentinel around the base of Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square.
Man Proposes, God Disposes is a depiction of the possible fate of the doomed 1845 Franklin Expedition to the North Pole. Landseer offers no comfort as to the fate of those 129 sailors. Two polar bears prowl the remaining fragments of an English vessel - a telescope, the tattered remains of a red ensign (ship’s flag), a sail, a mast and grimmest of all, human bones. The bears look ferocious. One tears into the ensign, teeth bared as it pulls rabidly on the fabric, all the while keeping its eyes chillingly fixed on the viewer. The other's head is raised as it chokes back a rib bone, mouth pulled into something that resembles a sneer. The endless arctic landscape behind them is apathetic: cold and barren. A fog appears to be rolling in.
Man Proposes, God Disposes, 1854, Sir Edwin Landseer
The painting was a brash response to the sensationalism that surrounded the lost Franklin Expedition in the mid 19th century. The trip was to chart the NorthWest Passage, a sea lane between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic Ocean useful for British trade with China. This made the journey a matter of British imperial interest and a vehicle of patriotism for the public. Its leader, Captain Sir John Franklin, had been selected by the Admiralty for being the Most British person they could find who both had experience and actually wanted to go, even though he was really the fifth choice for the job (Francis Crozier, his second-in-command was the third choice but was, among other reasons, unfortunately too Irish - the two first picks turned the experience down).
When Franklin departed from Kent in May 1845 on a course to the Canadian arctic aboard the HMS Erebus with Crozier commanding the HMS Terror at his flank, both vessels unusually hardy former bomb ships that had already been to the Antarctic and back, he brought with him 23 officers and 110 men. Apart from five sailors who were discharged due to sickness and sent home via a supply ship early in the voyage, all were to die. News back home was delayed however, and it was only in late 1847 when Franklin and his men would have been due back that their loved ones began to worry about the lack of news or sightings of the two boats on their way home. However, it took Franklin’s wife launching a public relations campaign to stir sentiment into action. After Lady Jane Franklin set up committees to lobby the Admiralty into launching a search and public figures like the author Charles Dickens speaking out in aid, publicity was high and so was anticipation for the fates of the crew. Information on the other hand, was thin on the ground and naturally within this void speculation spread like wildfire.
The British Public’s fascination with the poles and particularly the arctic had begun in the 1810’s, spurred by earlier expeditions to the edges of the world to chart the NorthWest Passage by accomplished sailors like James Ross and William Edward Parry. The arctic became a space of heroic endeavour, a set upon which human actors performed daring-do for an appreciative crowd back home. All to further the cause of British Imperialism of course. Britain had successfully beat China into submission and now looked for ways to more efficiently trade with it across the globe.
It is also important to stress that these men were not exploring empty land. No matter what contemporary pictorial depictions might suggest, there are multiple records of regular encounters between European explorers and the local Inuit population, and many successful explorers owe their triumph to the adoption of Inuit survival techniques. But patriotism was deeply entrenched in the interest in finding Franklin and his men. The narrative of the selfless, intrepid British explorers at the mercy of a land beyond civilisation of any kind was integral to funding and support for such expeditions, and now to its rescue efforts.
This was also powered by the overall mystique of the arctic as an environment and propelled by popular depictions of the landscape. In particular Romantic landscapes. Romanticism was a late 18th century art movement that saw artists recentre man’s relationship with the natural landscape, often working from life to evoke emotion and the power of nature in retaliation to the science and rationality of the Enlightenment movement. Within this movement the concept of the sublime percolated, characterized by awe-inspiring grandeur and vastness. Philosopher Edmund Burke asserted that psychologically the sublime created a feeling of insignificance that can be tied directly to the apprehension of God’s raw power. When Darwinism began taking effect in the latter half of the 19th century, slowly transforming environments from God’s own lands to unforgiving landscapes where survival of the fittest was the only writ worth following, this new reality was not dissimilar from the savagery of God’s nature as portrayed in the nihilistic sublime. Images of the arctic created at this time reflected this new consciousness, topically and emotionally-charged by the Franklin Expedition. Works projected a cynicism mirroring the dislodgement of humanity from its centre of a religious and Western world and the subsequent reveal of the true extent of nature's apathy. God is not there, only nature.
The Sea of Ice, 1823 - 1824, Caspar David Friedrich
In this context of an apathetic sublime it is possible that Landseer’s Man Proposes, God Disposes was inspired by two contemporary paintings: The Sea of Ice by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and Frederic Edwin Church's The Icebergs. Friedrich had never been to the arctic, but he studied reports of expeditions to the poles for inspiration. His own brother had been killed after falling through thin ice. Painted in 1824, the resulting work depicts the arctic landscape as almost brutalist, slabs of ice appearing like rock crushed together, shards reaching for the sky sharp as knives. Dwarfed and easily overlooked amid the formation is the mast of a ship, reframing the image as the calm after a devastating accident, reframing a massacre as incidental to the environment. Out here, in the sea of ice, there will be no aid for the stranded mariners, they may have already been dead for years.
The Icebergs, 1861, Frederic Edwin Church
Likewise, The Icebergs shows an unforgiving environment. Though originally intended as an observational Romantic landscape inspired by the artist’s trip into the arctic when painted in 1861, the lack of narrative and emptiness of the environment confused and disturbed viewers and Church was compelled to add a shipwreck to the artwork as an allusion to Franklin when the picture was displayed in London in 1863. The icebergs in the sea convey a sense of transience that disorients the viewer, the flux of nature almost Darwinian in design. The result is an eerie work that demands nothing from the viewer, the isolation of the vast sea above which the ragged forms of the icebergs loom make the broken mast that edges into frame at the bottom of the work seem peripheral, inevitable. Unlike its depictor, such an environment will not bend to the will of man.
Both works embrace the sublime; pleasure and horror, nature in the place of God, but nature is indifferent to us. There is no place here for the indomitable human spirit, or is there?
The arctic is defined as a place of contrasts. It was a space that seemed ripe for heroic endeavour, but almost all depictions emphasise a bleak futility; a beautiful landscape where fragile shapes, which in other climates would be susceptible to the sun, here could crush battleships in their path. The unrelenting white of the landscape evokes a cleanliness that is merely a symptom of the brutal cold. Likewise polar bears are majestic, and they are killers. Things and people are lost, but preserved forever in the permafrost. Even the concept of the sublime by definition defies imitation, yet artists still create works that aim to inspire grandeur and communicate a great sense of vastness regardless.
Therefore in the public consciousness this is the kind of place so isolated that when men get lost they know that no one will come for them, indeed so far from home by the time their loved ones would expect to hear from them they would be long dead. And over it all loomed the fates of those 129 men.
Landseer turns these notions on their heads. When Man Proposes, God Disposes went on display in 1864 any viewer facing the desperate viciousness of the image could imagine that the title, an evocation of humble submission, was meant to be ironic. Faced with the scrawny frames of the bears, one reviewer likened them to ‘monster ferrets’. Some might have wondered why the right-hand animal is chomping so ravenously on bare bones.
By 1848 it was clear that the Franklin Expedition was lost in the arctic and the admiralty had finally got their asses in gear, and launched several search parties to Northern Canada to search for Franklin and his men. In 1850, three graves were discovered on the uninhabited Beechey Island, less than two square miles of shale on Franklin’s route to the NorthWest Passage. Two were dated January and one April 1846. Nothing else was found until 1854, when an expedition led by Captain John Rae, an arctic explorer notable for befriending the local Inuit populations of Northern Canada and using their survival techniques, met some Inuits who told them that four winters hence another group had encountered 30-40 white men with whom they had traded ship relics for food. When they returned the next year they had found about 30-40 white skeletons and signs of cannibalism. Rae published these findings, but the British public weren't having it. Lady Jane Franklin memorably described Rae as "hairy and disagreeable". The Inuit were branded as liars and savages, but Rae stood firm at the time and modern archaeology has since corroborated this account.
So let’s reframe Landseer’s bears. The eating of bare bones evokes a ravenous intensity in line with desperation, and could be read as an allusion to cannibalism, the very last frontier of the starved. Given the notoriety of Rae’s 1854 report it is impossible to imagine Landseer was not familiar with this particular conclusion to the fated expedition. From an artist famed for his anthropomorphic depictions of the animal kingdom it is easy to draw one conclusion. The bears are both human and animal, representing the ferocity needed to become a last survivor, and the price it takes on your morality and humanity. It frames the sailors as savage beasts, yet denies the very same by embracing the naturality of the bear as a carnivore. More contrasts. As the polar bear rips into the British ensign, Landseer dismantles the patriotic rhetoric that surrounded the Franklin Expedition.
Lady Franklin hated it of course.
Furthermore, the ephemera of human habitation that surrounds the bears hint at another documented account from the search party of Captain Sir Francis M’Clintock, documented in The Voyage of the Fox in 1859, published at the same time as Darwin’s The Origin of Species. M’Clintock had discovered a boat hauled overland which contained two skeletons. One of disjointed bones, the other a complete skeleton. The narrative they tell is grim, but oddly the complete skeleton (the victorious man) was surrounded by ephemera: books, slippers, silk handkerchiefs. This bizarre luxury is at odds with the brutal landscape and the man’s own actions and eventual end, highlighting again the futility of the British Imperial might in this environment. It’s possible that Landseer references this directly through the objects surrounding the bears. Though the ensign, telescope and red coat seem to tell a tale of the fading star of the British Empire as much as they reference the Franklin Expedition.
The Abandoned Boat, John Macallan Swan
Though critics at the time did not accept Landseer’s work as an evocation of the sublime, too focused as it was on the brutality of nature, even melodramatic in its content, it is possible to read his work as the polar bear as God as nature. Many paintings at the time were using the polar bear as a stand in for both humanity and the brutality of the arctic. John Macallan Swan’s undated work The Abandoned Boat portrays polar bears swarming an abandoned lifeboat in the arctic sea, its previous resident presumed dead. The cause of death: cold, sea or bear, is all the same; all the arctic. Read through the understanding of nature as divinity, the bears are God, disposing.
Thomas Holloway bought Man Proposes, God Disposes in 1881, paying £6,615, an amount so large it broke the record for the highest sum ever paid at auction for a work by a contemporary artist, perhaps brought on by Holloway’s own interest in the expedition’s fate. The piece was acquired for Royal Holloway College, built expressly for the university-level education of women as part of a amassment of 77 works. The bears still hang there, staring with menace out across the Picture Gallery, haunted by the failure to save even one of 129 men, apart from a couple of weeks a year when they are covered by the Union Jack.
The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was the first person to successfully navigate the NorthWest Passage by small boat with a crew of six in 1905. In 2014, the remains of the HMS Erebus was rediscovered underwater, followed by the HMS Terror in 2016. It is possible that before sinking for almost two centuries onto the arctic ocean floor, that hungry polar bears did indeed tread through the wreckage of human habitation on either vessel, looking for scraps left behind by the stranded sailors. Man proposes, but ultimately in this unforgiving environment fate is up to the elements. This God disposes.
It might as well have been called ‘Nothing Matters’.