Entry Seven: The Vanished Sea
There is a story I keep returning to. A ship caught in a storm, waves rising higher than belief, light fractured by wind and fear. It was painted almost four hundred years ago, yet it feels like a mirror for now. The work is Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633) by Rembrandt van Rijn, his only seascape.
The painting shows Christ and his twelve disciples struggling against the fury of nature. The small wooden boat tilts toward the dark abyss as the sea thrashes around it. Some men cling to the mast, others vomit from fear, one frantically bails water. Only Christ remains calm, looking toward the heavens, light falling upon his face. Rembrandt painted himself into the scene, a familiar trick of self-insertion, holding the rigging with one hand and gazing directly at the viewer as if to say, we are all aboard this vessel.
He painted it in Amsterdam, in 1633, when he was not yet thirty years old. The Dutch Golden Age was in full bloom, trade routes expanding, ships sailing farther than ever, and the sea both promise and threat. For Rembrandt, the sea was not a subject to revisit; it was enough to capture it once. It remained his only seascape, as if he understood that no second attempt could match the first.
The painting traveled across centuries like the ships it depicted. From one collector to another, through inheritance and sale, until it reached Boston and the walls of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a Venetian dream built in New England, filled with treasures of the Old World. It hung there peacefully for decades, until one night the sea claimed it again.
On March 18, 1990, two men disguised as police officers entered the museum in the early morning hours. They tied up the guards, cut the paintings from their frames, and vanished into the city with thirteen masterpieces. Among them was The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The heist remains the largest unsolved art theft in history, worth more than half a billion dollars. The FBI has chased hundreds of leads, theories have surfaced and drowned, and still nothing has been recovered. The empty frame hangs on the museum wall to this day, an absence made permanent. I have my own theory by the way - ask me! (And I can also test who actually reads this blog)
The story feels almost mythic, a painting about chaos, stolen in chaos, swallowed by the world it once tried to depict.
That is why I’ve included it in Ghosts of the Ice. Because everything about it speaks to the themes that haunt this project: disappearance, fragility, and faith in the face of forces beyond control. The sea in Rembrandt’s painting is the same sea I will cross on the Rembrandt van Rijn. One storm was imagined in paint, the other unfolds in ice. One vanished from a museum; the other vanishes from the planet.
I keep thinking about that image, a small group of people in a boat, surrounded by forces greater than themselves. It could be Rembrandt’s disciples or the scientists and artists who will share my voyage north. We are all, in our own ways, trying to make sense of a storm we cannot stop - climate change.
The connection between the painting and the Arctic is not literal, but emotional. When ice breaks apart and drifts away, when glaciers melt into the sea, it is as if an image from the world’s memory has been cut from its frame. Both vanish quietly, leaving only the outline of what once was.
On board the Rembrandt van Rijn, I will not recreate the painting, but I will let its ghost travel with me. I will sketch, observe, and record, fragments of motion, waves, light. I want to see what Rembrandt might have seen before the storm consumed the scene. I want to stand on the deck and feel the same precarious tilt, the same awe, the same reminder that control is a story we tell ourselves.
And when I return, the painting will be reborn through the thermochromic pigments, fading with warmth, reappearing with cold, as if weather itself were the brush. It will hang in its frame like the original, but this one will be alive. When the temperature rises, the sea will vanish. When it cools, it will return. The work will become a quiet reenactment of the Gardner theft and of the Arctic’s own loss, both disappearances unfolding in silence.
Because art, like ice, is not fixed. It shifts, it melts, it remembers. And what remains is not the image, but the space it leaves behind.
