Painting of lost Arctic vessel sold for $60,000 at auction

RANDYBOSWELL
Postmedia News

Although the Canadian government failed to find the sunken HMS Terror during its high-profile search last month for the fabled Arctic shipwreck, an unidentified Canadian institution has secured an impressive consolation prize for the country: a historically significant and long-forgotten painting of the vessel that was auctioned this week in Britain.

A 175-year-old watercolour depiction of the ship, painted by the 19th-century artist and Arctic explorer George Back when he was commanding HMS Terror in 1836, sold at a Bonhams art auction on Tuesday to an unnamed Canadian museum or gallery for nearly $60,000 — more than double the expected price.

The picture shows the ship alongside an enormous iceberg in waters off Baffin Island, with one of Terror’s lifeboats being rowed in the foreground close to a group 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.

A Bonhams spokesperson told Postmedia News that the painting was purchased for $58,000 by “a Canadian institution” at the firm’s maritime art sale in London.
The painting had been expected to sell for between $15,000 and $25,000.

HMS Terror and its sister ship, HMS Erebus, have been in the news this summer because of a Parks Canada-led search for the wrecks of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition.
The two vessels, 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.

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 the artist-turned-admiral made a journal entry about the Terror’s encounter with a colossal iceberg off the southeast coast of Baffin Island.

“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.