During the `heroic age’ of Antarctic exploration, photography was still in its infancy so many polar explorers enlisted the services of an official artist to record their time (and hopefully achievements) in the polar regions. George Marston, was Shackleton’s Antarctic artist on board the original ENDURANCE, over 90 years ago.
George Marston was never well known as an artist beyond the Shackleton expeditions (1907-9 and 1914-16) but his skill at being able to record the exact colours and hues of the fantastic sights, which the explorers were among the first to ever see, was particularly impressive.
The role of an official artist on a polar expedition might seem like incredibly hard work these days. Marston would have to sketch in the open, harsh and windy conditions of Antarctica making extensive notes on colour, light and shade. Then he would retire to a cramped, ill-lit hut or ship to work with his materials in a more practical environment, where watercolours didn’t freeze and oil paints didn’t crack.
Marston’s tolerance of such difficult conditions gave rise to what is perhaps the best known story about him, that his oil paints were used to waterproof the seems of the three boats – James Caird, Dudley Docker and Stancomb-Wills. Marston describes this in his introduction to the catalogue of a small exhibition of his paintings shown in 1922:
When after eight months’ drift, fast locked in the ice of the Weddell Sea, the `Endurance’ was finally crushed…the whole of my work with the exception of those drawings marked by a star, went down with her. My oil colours were then commandeered to paint the seams of the boats (now our only hope), and in the final escape from the ice, six months later, we doubtlessly owe some small degree of our safety to those tubes of colour. I was now left with a few sheets of paper, half a dozen water colours and one pencil, which during that six months’ drift and the boat journey, were the most treasured possessions.
Camp on the breaking pack ice, Weddell Sea',
1915
However Marston’s end results are fantastic, and inspirational. The vivid colours of a unique environment, at that time in history, could only have done justice in the artist’s medium. The work of people such as George Marston and Edward Wilson, one of the key members of Robert Falcon Scott’s various Antarctic expeditions, remains hugely important as part of the historical record of man’s activities and discoveries in his early adventures onto the final continent.
To find out more about George Marston’s life click here
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Polar Exploration – Now and Then