Freeze frame

'To the Ends of the Earth' explores mystery and majesty of polar regions

''BYLOT ISLAND'' (CIRCA 1930) BY LAWREN S. HARRIS

SALEM - Humans are good at denial. We may be commendably curious, even intrepid explorers. But when it comes to snuffing out things we are not yet ready to see, we truly excel.

One of the great examples in art history is William Hodges, who traveled with Captain James Cook on the second of his three voyages to the Pacific.

In 1772, Hodges became the first Western artist to paint an eyewitness view of antarctic ice. An incredible thing, when you think about it - like the first ever ultrasound of a fetus in utero, or the first close-up of the moon.

Unfortunately, however, this precious document was destroyed. Not by nibbling rats, or mold, or a marauding pirate's clumsy cutlass, but by Hodges himself, who, before the voyage was over, painted over the scene with a lush New Zealand landscape in the century-old manner of Claude Lorrain. (How do we know this? Only because conservators discovered the underlying polar scene by chance in 2004.)

Evidently, Hodges just didn't think people would be interested.

What's more, he may have been right. He lived at the end of an era in which inherited pictorial conventions were usually more appealing than observed phenomena, however remarkable. (Hodges's views of Pacific islands hark back to ancient Greece and Rome, producing at times hilarious anomalies.) When it came to the polar regions, it would be almost 50 years before painters started to think differently.

"To the Ends of the Earth, Painting the Polar Landscape" at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem shows us what happened when 19th- and early 20th-century painters finally decided they were ready to see - and get excited about - the polar regions. (It coincides with "Polar Attractions," the museum's excellent interactive exhibit designed for children and families, through June 7.)

Assembled and researched by Samuel Scott, "To the Ends of the Earth" is a marvelous show. You could be forgiven for feeling that it presents rather too much of the same thing: Sea, sky, and ice, after all, can make for a monotonous stage set. What's more, although the artists here were among the most intrepid of their time, they were not all of the highest caliber.

It doesn't matter. Among the smattering of banal and mediocre things on display are some of the most mysterious and haunting images ever painted. The trick is to sniff them out.

Before you look at a painting like Frederic Edwin Church's "The Iceberg" of around 1875, for instance, forget about the fact that Church was by then an old lion of the Romantic Sublime and that in the minds of many, his way of painting had already been eclipsed by the likes of Courbet, Manet, and Monet across the Atlantic. Imagine your way into the picture instead.

It shows, quite simply, a ship in the middle distance sailing in front of a massive iceberg. It's actually a small painting - nothing like the scale of Church's earlier "grand canvases" that depicted nature thundering mightily against diminutive humanity.

But Church has composed it very carefully. The iceberg is positioned centrally, while the ship is over to the right and heading further that way. Soon, we are made to understand, it will be out of frame, just as the ray of light that irradiates the tip of the iceberg's tallest peak will shortly lift.

What will remain when the ship sails away and the sun has finally vanished is this massive, implacable body of ice, enveloped in water and shrouded in darkness. What more tender, proud, and untouchable subject could an artist paint? And who could have painted it better than Church?

Earlier in his career, Church had seen icebergs for himself, having sailed north specifically to find them. He was following in a line that stretched back to the 1830s, when adventurous artists started testing imaginary notions of the poles against observed reality. (Many got into more treacherous waters than Church, who did not actually enter the Arctic proper.)

Some saw the polar regions as a stage set for heroic drama. Others were driven by a quasi-scientific impulse to bear witness to parts of the world previously unseen and unexplored. A third response was more spiritual, tapping the power of the poles to evoke majesty and awe.

None of these urges, which correlate with the show's three themes, excluded the others, and artists like Church and William Bradford were motivated by all three.

Bradford, who pioneered the use of photography as an aid to his paintings and who came to be regarded as the preeminent polar artist of his day, dominates the show with 11 paintings. Some of them - in particular "Sealers Crushed by Icebergs," a monumental showpiece - are theatrical potboilers.

Others, however, are deeply enigmatic - none more so than the relatively small-scale "Lights of the Aurora." When you look at this painting, ignore the label, which prattles on about Bradford's "skilled brush" and his ability to bring "the viewer into the immediacy of the event." Instead, give yourself over to the distant, flickering strangeness of these lights, which throw a slender peninsula of land into deep silhouette and fan out into the night sky like the fronds of a ghostly palm.

Bradford's painting is a wonderful counterpart to the show's one monumental masterpiece, Church's "Aurora Borealis." This massive canvas shows a tiny schooner (it was commanded by Church's friend, the explorer Isaac Israel Hayes) surrounded by an epic, mountainous landscape beneath a huge sky dominated by the spectral presence of the aurora. The work is only dimly lit, which takes a moment to get used to, but it is absolutely the right way to display it, since it forces the eye to work to enter the scene. The result, if you're in a susceptible mood, is a sort of imaginative flaring akin to the effect of breathing on glowing embers.

The show includes works by 20th-century artists for whom the virginal purity and austerity of polar landscapes answered to the clean lines, geometrical shapes, and clear, even light of modernism.

I found the results - epitomized in the works of Canada's Lawren S. Harris and America's Rockwell Kent - disheartening. Suddenly, you feel the ideas of man prevailing over the mysteries of nature. Kent, for instance, described his beloved Greenland as "the eternal fountainhead of all that is beautiful in art and man, the virgin universe."

But to look at his paintings is to feel modernist rhetoric overtaking mystery. What was wild and threatening is now domesticated, homogenized, and altogether too well-lit.

More appealing were the small, determinedly modest pastels by David Abbey Paige, who became enthralled by unusual solar effects, such as haloes, "mock suns," and strange cloud formations. When the captain of his vessel suggested he paint a dramatic twilight scene, he seemed ready enough to see it, just not yet to depict it:

"I could paint it, alright, but what's the use? Nobody would believe it. Whoever saw a sky like that? How can you describe a sea that's like no sea ever was or will be again . . . a sky so China-like that a single sharp sound might shatter it?"

Maybe William Hodges felt something like this back in 1772.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.