Aurora Borealis

Green light curls across the night sky like smoke, streaked with a strange red glow that spills toward the horizon. Below it, a lonely ship sits locked in the ice, so small against the dark mountain that you might miss it at first. This is Frederic Edwin Church's "Aurora Borealis," painted in 1865. Church belonged to the Hudson River School, a group of American artists who loved painting nature at its biggest and most dramatic, and few subjects fit that better than the Northern Lights over a frozen Arctic wilderness.

The scene comes from real life. Church worked from sketches by the explorer Isaac Hayes, and the trapped ship is meant to be Hayes's own vessel from his dangerous voyage into the far north. The painting arrived during the American Civil War, and plenty of people at the time read the blood-red streak in the sky as a bad omen, a warning of hard days ahead. You can take it that way or simply admire the eerie glow, but either way the message lands the same: nature is vast, cold, and completely indifferent to the tiny humans caught beneath it.