Edwin Dickinson - Polar Pictures

Polar Pictures

Between 1924 and 1926 Dickinson painted four pictures (one now lost) growing out of his keen interest in polar exploration. His involvement in the subject began with reading Arctic explorer Donald B. MacMillan's book Four Years in the White North. MacMillan was a Provincetown native and Dickinson knew him well. In at least two of the paintings the feeling of melancholic lassitude evident in his larger paintings is gone, replaced by a coherent narrative or scene rooted not in recollection but in the excitement of adventure. However, in one of the paintings, Bible Reading Aboard the Tegetthoff, 1925–26, Ward believes the imagery is more personal. He sees the tipsy, shadowy figures as embroiled in a Manichean struggle between darkness and light, centered on the Bible reader, whom he identified with Dickinson's father, a Presbyterian minister who conducted daily Bible readings at home. He suggests that the feet protruding from a long, curving, cylindrical, dark form descending over them may represent his mother about to be enveloped by death.