175-year-old Arctic painting bought by Canadian museum

A watercolour scene of the famous Arctic expedition ship HMS Terror and one of its rowboats, painted by Royal Navy artist-turned-admiral George Back, will hang in the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. (FILE PHOTO)

RANDY BOSWELL
Postmedia News

The mystery surrounding the sale earlier this month of a 175-year-old, previously undocumented painting of a dramatic Arctic scene — created by the famed admiral-artist Sir George Back during a voyage to Canada in 1836 — has been solved.

It turns out the unnamed “Canadian institution” that acquired the painting for $60,000 at a Bonhams art auction in Britain on Sept. 13 was the Canadian Museum of Civilization, giving every citizen in the country a small stake in the historic artwork, which depicts the Back-commanded HMS Terror alongside a massive iceberg in waters off Baffin Island.

“The Canadian taxpayer is now the proud owner of this lovely little painting,” David Morrison, a specialist in Arctic archeology at Canada’s main history museum, told Postmedia News.

Morrison said the scene depicted in Back’s watercolour sketch shows “a ship of enormous historical significance” for Canada that ranks with 15th-century explorer John Cabot’s Matthew and just a “handful” of other vessels that played critical roles in the country’s past.

In fact, Terror and its companion ship, HMS Erebus, already have been declared national historic sites even though generations of wreck hunters — and just this summer, a team of archeologists from Parks Canada — have failed to find their resting places somewhere in the Arctic Ocean near King William Island.

The two ships, then under the command of Royal Navy commander John Franklin, became locked in sea ice and were abandoned near King William Island in the late 1840s, eventually slipping beneath the waves in unknown locations.

Morrison said the museum, located in Gatineau, Que., across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill, plans to display the painting when it arrives from the British auction house this fall.

He added that museum officials made pre-auction checks with both Library and Archives Canada and the National Gallery of Canada to be sure the three federal agencies weren’t bidding against each other when Back’s painting came up for sale.

The picture shows the Terror, in the distance, in the shadow of a colossal iceberg, with one of the ship’s lifeboats in the foreground encountering a herd of walruses.

Back’s sketches and paintings of scenes observed during several 19th-century British expeditions to the Canadian Arctic are among the most important sets of visual documents of the country’s early history.

The painting of the Terror emerged recently from a British family of Back’s descendants, and experts were not previously aware of its existence.

At the time of the sale, Bonhams — in keeping with standard auction house practices — would not identify the buyer of the artifact.

The painting had been expected to sell for between $15,000 and $25,000, but hot demand pushed the price to nearly double the pre-sale estimate.

Franklin and all 128 of his crewmen perished during the expedition, but a series of would-be rescue missions in the 1850s completed much of the mapping of the North American Arctic and helped secure Canadian sovereignty over a vast swath of the region in the 1880s.

This summer’s Parks Canada search for the lost Franklin ships failed to yield either of the targets, but Environment Minister Peter Kent recently pledged to continue the hunt in future years.

Researchers believe the Back painting dates from July 1836, when he made a journal entry about the Terror’s encounter with a giant iceberg off of Baffin’s southeast coast.

“We observed an enormous berg, the perpendicular face of which was not less than 300 feet high,” Back wrote at the time. He also noted that he sent several crewmen in one of the ship’s lifeboats “to procure fresh water from the pools formed on the surface” of the floating mountain of ice.

Back’s command of the HMS Terror expedition of 1836-37 was a difficult one, and the badly damaged ship barely made it back to Britain after a perilous summer voyage in Canada through unusually ice-choked Arctic waters.

The loss of the same vessel under Franklin’s command a decade later brought an end to one of the most storied ships in British and Canadian history.

The Terror — launched from a shipyard in southwest England in 1813 — also played a notable role in American history. It was one of the British ships involved in the War of 1812 bombardment of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, an attack recounted in vivid detail in Francis Scott Key’s lyrics for the U.S. national anthem.