Considered one of Church's "Great Pictures"—measuring 1.64 by 2.85 metres (5.4 by 9.4 feet)[1]—the painting depicts one or more icebergs in the afternoon light of the Arctic.

The unconventional landscape of ice, water, and sky generally drew praise, but the American Civil War, which began the same year, lessened critical and popular interest in New York City's cultural events.

The painting became popular within Church's oeuvre and inspired other landscape artists' interest in the Arctic, but its apparent lack of narrative or allegory perplexed some viewers.

In 1979, the painting, which a number of New York City galleries were now hunting, was rediscovered in a home in Manchester, England, where it had remained for most of the intervening 78 years.

The buyers, later identified as businessman Lamar Hunt and his wife Norma, donated the canvas to the Dallas Museum of Art, where it remains today.

The disappearance of the expedition of British explorer John Franklin, who had planned to navigate the Northwest Passage, was a popular press topic in the 1850s.

"[6] In June 1859, Church and his friend the writer Louis Legrand Noble took a steamship from Halifax, Nova Scotia to St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.

[7] They chartered a schooner to approach the sea ice, and Church used a rowboat to get close to the icebergs, making sketches in pencil and oil while enduring sea-sickness.

A landscape depicting just ice, water, and sky was unconventional and its composition a "hazardous experiment", according to his contemporary, the writer Henry Tuckerman, with "little scope for general effect".

Church decided to call the painting The North, a title with a double meaning: a picture of the Arctic and a patriotic reference to the northern Union.

The painting is one of Church's composite views, like his popular The Heart of the Andes (1859), in which he combined elements from many sketches with his imagination to convey the essential character of the setting.

Church's particular challenge was to produce a grand landscape painting of an environment so limited in form, color, and living things.

Given its lack of figurative language, it may have been written by Church himself—Louis LeGrand Noble, by contrast, used much rhetorical flourish in his booklet for The Heart of the Andes.

Imagine an amphitheatre, upon the lower steps of which you stand, and see the icy foreground at your feet, and gaze upon the surrounding masses, all uniting in one beneath the surface of the sea.

Thus the beholder has around him the manifold forms of the huge Greenland glacier after it has been launched upon the deep, and subjected, for a time, to the action of the elements—waves and currents, sunshine and storm.

[14]The Icebergs' play of light is highly detailed, with the afternoon sun[note 3] somewhere at left casting shadows in blues, purples, and pinks, and the ice and water interacting in complex reflections, especially by the grotto.

This more turbulent area with its variety of color creates a "material play between surface and depth", according to art historian Jennifer Raab.

As described by Carr, there are also intentional "vague humanoid profiles" on the right, "skull-like" ice blocks in the foreground, and a "floating ice-'siren'" near the grotto.

Church observed that freshly frozen water within the cracks of icebergs produced a striking blue color; these veins of sapphire are illustrated at left.

In the distance, the largest iceberg shows old waterlines, indicating its continuing ascent, and the foreground appears wetter, having risen from the ocean more recently.

Last year the announcement of such a work would have packed the gallery from morning till night for weeks; now so intense and eager is the interest concentrated upon the capital, the movements of forces, and the pageantry wherein the town has draped itself, that we doubt if any considerable number of our citizens are aware of its exhibition..."[20] Church's paintings were greatly anticipated, and many critics responded positively to The Icebergs.

The Albion warned that "ordinary observers ... may perhaps experience some slight disappointment when they miss all familiar objects and find no trace whatever of human association ... no connecting link of any sort between themselves and the canvas.

A picture of barren ice offered only solitude—"not Romantic solitude, but rather nature apart from man, shaped by gravity and entropy, resistant to symbolism.

"[25] In Raab's analysis of the picture, its limited use of symbols leaves the viewer unable to resort to allegorical readings like those commonly found in the work of Thomas Cole, Church's teacher.

[27] The Icebergs was purchased by Edward Watkin, a British member of parliament and businessman who played a role in the development of a trans-continental North American railroad.

[32] The exhibitions of The Icebergs in England probably influenced Edwin Landseer's 1864 painting, Man Proposes, God Disposes, which depicts two polar bears tearing at a wreckage that would evoke the lost Franklin expedition.

[33][34] In 1865, Church returned to the northern theme in a major painting, Aurora Borealis, which, together with his Cotopaxi and Chimborazo, was shown in London that year in a three-painting exhibition.

[42] The painting was shipped to Sotheby's in New York City, where it was confirmed to be in excellent condition, needing only cleaning with soap and water, removal of varnish, and adjustments to the stretchers.

[43] The importance of the painting drew more sellers to Sotheby's planned auction, hoping to capitalize on the increasing interest in the semi-annual event.

It means something if somebody pays $2.5 million for a lummocking spread of icebergs by Frederic Church, a salon machine whose pedestrian invocations of the sublime are not worth one square foot of a good Turner.