Museum catalogue: Polar Art Collection

March 1876, a little over 100 yds on starboard beam


Accession no.:	Y: 56/23
Title:	March 1876, a little over 100 yds on starboard beam
Description:	Watercolour by Staff Surgeon Edward Lawton Moss painted during Sir George Nares' British Arctic Expedition, 1875-76 in H.M.S. Alert and Discovery.
Medium:	Watercolour
Artist:	Moss, Edward Lawton
Note:	Note, hand-written on reverse: 'Winter Quarters of HMS Alert, 82.27N. Sketched amongst the hummocks on our starboard beam before our sun rise in 1876'. 'Nowhere is it more true that the low sun makes the colour than in the Arctic regions. The ice and snow, that are wearily white in midsummer, glow with all sorts of opaline tinits in the sunrise light of March. The sketch is from amongst the floebergs to seaward of the ship. The sides of the berg in the centre have been worn into columns and alcoves by the surface floods of some former summer; but it has since been forced higher on the beach, and into shallower water. Snow-drifts fill up all the gorges and ravines amongst the bergs, and are in some places so hardened by wind and inflitration of sea-water, that tidal motion cracks and fissures them, especially round the grounded bergs' - Extract from 'Shores of the Polar Sea'.
Dimensions:	Image: Width: 280mm; height: 195mm Mount: Width: 555mm; height: 410mm