Green and red auroras burst across a dark Arctic sky, their rays fanning out above a looming cliff and its glittering ice. At the foot of the cliff, tiny against the dark water and pack ice, a ship lies frozen in place, and the Smithsonian says a dogsled hints at hope of rescue. Frederic Edwin Church based the picture on sketches by his friend Isaac Israel Hayes, the polar explorer, who gave them to him after returning from his Arctic expedition in 1861. It shows Hayes's ship, the SS United States, locked in the ice.

During the Civil War the northern lights were widely read as a sign of God's displeasure with the Confederacy, and viewers understood Church's picture as alluding to that omen in a conflict that was still unresolved. The museum's research notes say Church completed the painting around the time the war ended in April 1865, and scholars have linked the aurora in it to the war. It was given to the Smithsonian American Art Museum by Eleanor Blodgett in 1911. It is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.