The scene shows two polar bears among the scattered wreckage of the expedition – a telescope, the tattered remains of a red ensign, a sail, and human bones, which William Michael Rossetti called "the saddest of membra disjecta".

The image shows humanity and civilization defeated by "nature, red in tooth and claw", and can be seen as a commentary on the crisis of British triumphalism and imperialism in the middle of the 19th century.

The painting depicts an imagined Arctic scene in the aftermath of Sir John Franklin's expedition in 1845 to explore the Northwest Passage.

In 1854, Inuit recounted tales of sightings in 1850 to Captain John Rae of the Hudson's Bay Company, and he found some dead bodies on King William Island.

The phrase was also put on a Dutch commemorative medal celebrating the Elizabethan England Protestant victory in 1588 over the Catholic Spanish Armada.

The Art Journal described its "poetry, pathos, and terror" and "tragic grandeur", the Athenaeum noted an "epic" quality, and the Saturday Review praised its "sublimity of sentiment".