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Foggy Island

Image Item
A man stands on the shore of a foggy island
Description

This image is primarily remarkable for its dissimilarity to other images by Sir George Back.

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Crossing Lake Aylmer (3hs. a.m.)

Image Item
The frozen landscape of Lake Aylmer
Description

A train of men and sleds navigate an icy crevasse in Lake Aylmer, in the middle of the Arctic night. Sir George Back's depiction of this scene realistically though artistically conveys the trials endured by explorers of the time period, as well as the starkly "other" landscape that the Arctic represented.

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Boats in a Swell Among Ice

Image Item
Rowboats among large pieces of ice
Description

Two rowboats fearlessly navigate massive, strangely shaped blocks of ice without any apparent trouble. Such an image, depicting both the threat of untamed nature and the successful human exploration of that nature, results in an uncanny combination of implicit danger and imperialist (as well as pragmatist) confidence.

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Beverly's Falls, Mouth of Hoarfrost River

Image Item
Beverly's Falls at the mouth of the Hoarfrost River
Description

One of Sir George Back's most picturesque images from Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition, "Beverly's Falls" also subtly challenges that convention with its lowered viewpoint, the realistic scale of its subjects, and Back's sublime-inflected description of the scene in the accompanying narrative.

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The Aesthetics of Difficulty: George Back's Pragmatic Arctic Landscapes

A small rowboat passes a glacier
Date Published:
August 2009
Description

The artwork of Sir George Back, Royal Navy explorer of the Canadian Arctic, invites our reexamination of the paradigms of Romantic visual culture via its depiction of the “otherness” that the Arctic represented to the British during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the difficulty of physically navigating that landscape. A compelling combination of the picturesque, sublime and “true-to-nature”—a combination sometimes found in just one image—Back’s artwork is almost equally aesthetically and scientifically driven, and as such walks a peculiar line that evades merely imperialist, picturesque, sublime or scientistic tropes.

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James Cox

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The Chamber Idyll

Image Item
Two lovers in a dark room
Description

This intimate domestic scene portrays two lovers who, because of their profound absorption in each other, are simultaneously spectator and spectacle.

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Bartholomew Fair

Image Item
The Bartholomew Fair
Description

St. Bartholomew’s Fair was one of the highlights of the London social season, drawing crowds from all strati of society. 

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The Cockpit

Image Item
A crowd bets on a cock fight
Description

This image depicts a cockfight, with special emphasis on the diversity of spectators in attendance and their singularity of purpose (gambling).

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Doctor Syntax at Covent Garden Theatre

Image Item
Theater-goers watch a performance
Description

In this illustration of William Combe's comic text, Dr. Syntax seeks the picturesque in the theater.

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