ARCTIC & ANTARCTICA

The polar regions have fascinated and frustrated human ambition for centuries. The search for a Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic archipelago of North America drove European exploration northward from the sixteenth century, generating a series of voyages whose hardships and occasional triumphs were recorded in the published accounts that are the primary visual source for polar history before the age of photography. The antique prints produced from these accounts — depicting the ice-bound ships, the treacherous coastlines, the encounters with indigenous peoples and the extraordinary landscapes of the polar world — are among the most dramatic and historically significant images in the entire tradition of exploration illustration.

The earliest Arctic prints appear in the published accounts of the Elizabethan voyages: Frobisher’s three expeditions of 1576–1578, Davis’s voyages of the 1580s and Hudson’s explorations of the early seventeenth century all generated illustrated publications that brought the Arctic world to European readers for the first time. These images are necessarily speculative in their geography but vivid in their depiction of the human experience of polar exploration — the crushing ice, the desperate attempts to free beset ships and the encounters with Inuit peoples who were the only inhabitants of these extreme environments.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the development of Arctic whaling and sealing as major industries, and the prints produced in connection with this commercial activity provide a different perspective on the polar world from the exploratory tradition. Dutch and British whaling publications documented the techniques, hazards and rewards of Arctic hunting with a combination of practical information and visual drama that makes them among the most compelling examples of early maritime illustration.

The Royal Navy’s systematic campaign to find the Northwest Passage in the early nineteenth century — culminating in the Franklin expedition of 1845–1848 and the search operations that followed it for more than a decade — generated an extraordinary body of illustrative material. The artists who accompanied the expeditions, and the illustrators who worked from their sketches and descriptions, produced images of Arctic landscapes, icebergs and navigation that set a standard for polar illustration that persisted through the rest of the century. The mystery of Franklin’s fate, unresolved until recent years, gave these images an additional resonance that has made them consistently sought-after by collectors.

Antarctic exploration entered its heroic phase in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the expeditions of Ross, Borchgrevink, Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen pushed progressively closer to the South Pole. The illustrated publications of these expeditions — and the photographic imagery that increasingly supplemented traditional illustration — document one of the great adventure narratives of the modern era with a vividness that has lost none of its power.

For collectors, antique polar prints offer material of exceptional drama and genuine rarity. The combination of extreme subject matter, historical significance and the physical difficulty of working in polar conditions — which limited both the number of artists who could record these environments and the survival of the resulting works — makes original examples of real quality increasingly scarce and consistently sought-after.