The pen inscription to the verso reads: “Robert E. Peary - For Dan Weinstein, fellow traveller, North-Pole - 4 August 1991. Wally Herbert. Peace be with you. Best - W.”
A sensitive portrait of the man who claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1909, by an explorer from another generation who debunked him.
Sir Wally Herbert (1934 - 2007) was lifelong veteran of Arctic and Antarctic exploration, approaching both with a sense of adventure most often associated with the Heroic Age. He was also a keen artist throughout his intrepid career. After quitting the Royal Engineers in Egypt he vagabonded his way across the Middle East and Mediterranean drawing portraits for board and lodgings. His time as an explorer took him first to the Antarctic with the New Zealand sledging expedition, and then north to the Arctic, where his efforts culminated in the 1969 trans-Arctic expedition which successfully crossed the icecap via the North Pole.
In the 1980s Herbert was invited by the National Geographic Survey to consult Robert Peary’s archive of records from his 1909 North Pole claim. Herbert found Peary’s notebooks to be lacking essential data, and disputed the American explorer’s long contested achievement in an article published in National Geographic, and then in a book-length work, The Noose of Laurels (1989). The present portrait was made by Herbert during the time when he was writing and researching this book, so the questions overhanging Robert Peary’s achievements would have been at the forefront of his mind. This, perhaps, is echoed in the way Peary’s face is shrouded in darkness.
Herbert’s British Trans-Arctic Expedition reached the North Pole on 6th April 1969, as part of their 3800 mile crossing of the icecap. The inscription to “fellow traveller” Dan Weinstein adds another dimension to network of polar personalities surrounding this portrait.
