The new edition of After Icebergs with a Painter A Summer Voyage to Labrador and around Newfoundland (Black Dome Press, 2022), by Louis Legrand Noble with an introduction by William L. Coleman, looks at an internationally renowned American artist of fame and fortune at the very peak of his powers.
A pastor and lauded writer with a sharp eye for revealing and humorous detail, Noble describes a journey fraught with danger and drama aboard the schooner Integrity to the latitudes where icebergs dwell with Hudson River School painter Frederic Church.
Noble’s vivid tale of that 1859 voyage offers fascinating insight into an artistic career like no other, a career that has continued to inspire subsequent generations. It also presents a fragile moment just before the outbreak of the Civil War and the unavoidable evidence of climate change in these regions, making After Icebergs with a Painter even more valuable as a document of its time.
This extensively illustrated new edition brings this long-out-of-print book to 21st-century audiences and expands upon the original by including an introductory essay by Frederic Church scholar William L. Coleman, the first detailed map of the journey, and the vast majority of the images inspired by this epic trip that Church created over a long and productive career.
Louis Legrand Noble was a clergyman born in Lisbon, St. Lawrence County, NY in 1813. He graduated from Bristol College in Pennsylvania in 1837 and after attending the General Theological Seminary in the city of New York in 1840 was ordained deacon and a priest the following year in 1841. He served as assistant minister in St. Peter’s Church in Albany in 1840; rector of Christ Church, Elizabeth City, North Carolina in 1841-44; he was rector of St. Luke’s Church in Catskill, NY in 1844; of Grace Church in Chicago in 1855; of the Church of the Messiah, Glens Falls in 1856; of Trinity Church in Fredonia in 1857; of Christ Church in Hudson, NY in 1859; and of St. John’s Church in Ionia, Michigan in 1880.
Noble also served as professor of English and History in St. Stephen’s College, now Bard College, in Annandale, NY, beginning in 1874. In addition to many shorter poems, he published Ne-Ma-Min, an Indian Story, in three cantos (1852); The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life, and other Pictures of Thomas Cole, N. A., with Selections from his Letters and Miscellaneous Writings, Illustrative of his Life, Character, and Genius (New York, 1853); The Lady Angeline, a Lay of the Appalachians; the Hours, and other Poems (1857); and A Voyage to the Arctic Seas in Search of Icebergs, with Church, the Artist (1861). Noble died in Ionia, Michigan in 1882.
The new edition of After Icebergs – 256 full-color pages, 6 x 9 trade paperback, with 44 illustrations and more than 40 paintings and sketches – is priced at $19.95 at the publisher’s website here.
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