This grizzly painting of two polar bears rending apart the remains of human corpses with a shipwreck in the background is the subject of a fascinating urban legend.
Called _Man Proposes, God Disposes_, it was painted by artist Edwin Landseer in 1864 to depict the tragic failure of Englishman Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition 19 years prior. Franklin had taken two Royal Navy ships and 129 men to try and find a Northwest Passage in Canadian waters that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The men disappeared, and a search party later discovered that the men’s bodies were found by some Inuit people, who claimed their bones showed signs of cannibalism.
All of this was extremely distressing for the colonizing British Empire at the time, and the painting’s subject and title gets at the anxiety of a world power coming to terms with its limits. The artwork and doomed expedition fascinated Thomas Holloway, a businessman-turned philanthropist who bought the piece to be hung prominently in the picture gallery of the Royal Holloway College, University of London, which he had just founded in 1886.
Rumors began as early as the 1920s that the painting brought bad luck. Students believed that if you looked at the painting during exams you would fail — the superstition continues to this day, and ever since the 1970s a Union Jack flag covers the piece of art when exams are held in the room. The most gruesome component of the legend is a story of a student who looked into the eyes of one of the polar bears and went insane, killing herself — after scrawling “the polar bears made me do it” on her exam.
No records of such a suicide exist.
P.S., one of the ships’ remains were discovered in 2014, and in the 1980s three very well preserved bodies of the deceased crew were discovered.
Sources: _Huffpost_ “Why do so many students at Royal Holloway fear Edwin Landseer’s eerie painting?” Lucy Sherrif, The Huffington Post UK, Sept 16, 2014. BBC, “The painting reputed to make students fail exams,” 13 Sept 2014, Magazine Monitor
