Artwork story
About An Arctic Summer: Boring Through the Pack in Melville Bay
The artist and artwork
William Bradford painted An Arctic Summer: Boring Through the Pack in Melville Bay in 1871, using oil on a canvas nearly six and a half feet wide. Raised in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, near the whaling port of New Bedford, he began as a largely self-taught painter of ships before receiving limited training from the Dutch marine painter Albert Van Beest. Bradford made the first of seven Arctic expeditions in 1861. This painting grew from sketches and photographs made during his final voyage in 1869, when the 325-ton steamer Panther traveled along Greenland's northern coast.
The world around it
Nineteenth-century audiences followed polar exploration through expedition reports, lectures, paintings, and illustrated travel books. Bradford was inspired in part by Elisha Kent Kane's account of the search for the missing Franklin expedition, joining other American artist-explorers who treated distant environments as subjects for both observation and spectacle. Photography gave the 1869 voyage a new kind of record, but it was arduous fieldwork: wet-collodion glass plates had to be exposed and developed near the scene, with cameras, chemicals, trays, and other equipment carried across the ice. Bradford later published 125 expedition photographs in The Arctic Regions in 1873.
A detail to notice
The polar bear looks tiny at first, almost lost near the center of the enormous foreground. Bradford's journal explains that the Panther's crew wanted to hunt it because they were eager to obtain its skin, but the bear glanced back and escaped toward the water. That outcome changes the picture's drama. The ship and scattered human figures possess technology and apparent purpose, while the animal remains free and the broken ice dictates every route. Bradford surrounds the episode with a dark cliff, luminous iceberg, open water, and a vast weather-filled sky, making the attempted hunt a brief incident inside a landscape whose scale the expedition cannot master.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Oil on canvas and held in The American Wing.
Recorded dimensions include 51 3/4 x 78 in. (131.4 x 198.1 cm); framed: 60 x 86 1/2 x 4 in.
Subject terms include Landscapes and Ships. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Gift of Erving and Joyce Wolf, in memory of Diane R. Wolf, 1982.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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