The Icebergs is an 1861 oil painting by the American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church. It was inspired by his 1859 voyage to the North Atlantic around Newfoundland and Labrador. Considered one of Church's "Great Pictures"—measuring 1.64 by 2.85 metres (5.4 by 9.4 feet)—the painting depicts one or more icebergs in the afternoon light of the Arctic. It was first displayed in New York City in 1861, where visitors paid 25 cents' admittance to the one-painting show. Similar exhibitions in Boston and London followed. The unconventional landscape of ice, water, and sky generally drew praise, but the American Civil War, which began the same year, lessened critical and popular interest in New York City's cultural events.

The painting became popular within Church's oeuvre and inspired other landscape artists' interest in the Arctic, but its apparent lack of narrative or allegory perplexed some viewers. Between exhibitions in the US and England, Church added the ship mast to the painting, and retitled the work from its original The North. He eventually sold the painting in England, where it disappeared from the art-world's awareness after the buyer's death in 1901. In 1979, the painting, which a number of New York City galleries were now hunting, was rediscovered in a home in Manchester, England, where it had remained for most of the intervening 78 years. It was soon put to auction in New York City, drawing significant interest as its sale coincided with renewed critical interest in Church, who had been largely forgotten in the 20th century. The Icebergs was auctioned for US$2.5 million, the most of any American painting to that point. The buyers, later identified as businessman Lamar Hunt and his wife Norma, donated the canvas to the Dallas Museum of Art, where it remains today.

Church painted The Icebergs at a time of general interest in Arctic exploration. The disappearance of the expedition of British explorer John Franklin, who had planned to navigate the Northwest Passage, was a popular press topic in the 1850s. In 1856 the American explorer Elisha Kane published an account of his own expedition to determine Franklin's fate. Francis Leopold McClintock finally uncovered the fate of Franklin and his crew, which he described in an 1859 book. Church too was interested in the Arctic, and in science and geography. He was a member of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, where the Arctic explorer Isaac Israel Hayes had lectured, and in 1859 he journeyed to the Arctic himself. Hayes, a friend of Church, named an Arctic peak at the Kennedy Channel after Church in the summer of 1861. As Church scholar David C. Huntington wrote, "By going north in 1859 Church was both following and leading the public mind.... Church had a democratic genius for embodying the archetype of the immediate and immediately present. His artistic hand responded to the moment's aggregate curiosity."

In June 1859, Church and his friend the writer Louis Legrand Noble took a steamship from Halifax, Nova Scotia to St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. For about a month they traveled in the area of Cape Race and along the Avalon Peninsula. They chartered a schooner to approach the sea ice, and Church used a rowboat to get close to the icebergs, making sketches in pencil and oil while enduring sea-sickness. He produced about one hundred sketches, ranging from small pencil drawings to atmospheric oil studies. Returning to New York, he painted Twilight in the Wilderness (1860) before committing to The Icebergs, which took about six months, in the winter of 1860. Church was then at the height of his fame, and newspapers regularly updated the public on the progress of the painting. Noble documented their voyage in his book After Icebergs with a Painter, which was published to coincide with the exhibition of The Icebergs.

Church produced a number of advanced studies as he searched for the most favorable composition, relying on intuition. A landscape depicting just ice, water, and sky was unconventional and its composition a "hazardous experiment", according to his contemporary, the writer Henry Tuckerman, with "little scope for general effect". Church told his agent that he was pleased with the canvas as he neared completion.

Shortly before the first exhibition, the American Civil War began. Church decided to call the painting The North, a title with a double meaning: a picture of the Arctic and a patriotic reference to the northern Union. Advertisements for the exhibition noted that the admission proceeds would be donated to the Patriotic Fund, which supported Union soldiers' families.

The painting is one of Church's composite views, like his popular The Heart of the Andes (1859), in which he combined elements from many sketches with his imagination to convey the essential character of the setting. This approach to landscape painting accorded with the ideas of his aesthetic influences: Alexander von Humboldt, the popular naturalist and science writer who devoted a section of his Kosmos to landscape art; and John Ruskin, the famous English art critic. Church's particular challenge was to produce a grand landscape painting of an environment so limited in form, color, and living things. As the American art historian Gerald L. Carr writes, "By standards of its day, the composition was virtually abstract. Much was left to the imagination."

A broadside was prepared to orient exhibition visitors to the painting. It described the scene in largely objective terms. Given its lack of figurative language, it may have been written by Church himself—Louis LeGrand Noble, by contrast, used much rhetorical flourish in his booklet for The Heart of the Andes. The broadside begins by orienting the viewer to the scene as a whole: