This painting captures a dramatic scene from Rear-Admiral Sir James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expedition of 1839-43. Ross was given command of HMS ‘Erebus’ and HMS ‘Terror’ to carry out a magnetic survey in the Antarctic region. The expedition resulted in various discoveries, including the area subsequently known as the Ross Ice Barrier.

The artist portrays the Antarctic as a world of grandeur and the sublime: the night scene, the agitated waves and the towering icebergs dwarfing and isolating the man-made ships, eerily lit by flashes of light on their dangerous passage through the pack with broken masts.

By the mid-19th century, depictions of both the Arctic and the Antarctic held a fascination for the art-loving audience, and it is likely the painting was executed soon after Ross published his travel narrative “A Voyage of Discovery and Research to Southern and Antarctic Regions” in 1847. The artistic formula employed here links the painting to the tradition of the sublime natural catastrophe as it had appeared in European painting since the late 18th century. More precisely, the scene refers to an episode in the travel book (vol. II, pp. 217-22) and to the print by JE (John Edward) David, first mate of HMS Terror, accompanying it, documenting and defining its most dramatic and glorious moment.

After the collision of the two ships on the March 12, 1842, which crippled the ‘Erebus’s’ masts, the latter escaped the life-threatening gales of a storm by moving into a narrow channel in the chain of bergs. The crew could just make out the ‘Terror’s’ light, reassuring them of their fellow sailors’ safety, when they experienced the natural phenomenon of what they believed to be the Aurora australis. The appearance of the bright light marks the end of the peril and in the narrative is followed by a reference to a collective prayer. The painter, assumed to be Richard Brydges Beechey, has adhered to Davis’s composition and at the same time heightened the drama of the scene according to the academic rule, matching and surpassing the written account.

Admiral Richard Brydges Beechey (1808-1895) was the son of the portrait painter Sir William Beechey. He entered the Royal Naval College in 1821 and probably trained under the drawing master Jon Christian Schetky. During his naval career he also took part in a voyage of discovery taking him to the Pacific. Beechey retired from the Navy in 1864, but continued to paint and to exhibit at the Royal Academy. He specialized in maritime subjects (BHC1270).