For centuries the polar landscape stood as the embodiment of nature’s stern and heartless grandeur. Now it is viewed as mortally wounded by big-footing humans who have reduced mighty glaciers to quivering slush.

What we have lost along with this inviolable wilderness is the possibility of awe. Nature seems a little too wimpy to stir an emotion that depends on acknowledging our own insignificance before the vastness of the universe. At best we hope to stumble across something pristine on the planet, a patch of turf protected from human excess.

Any chance we get to reconnect with that sense of awe is gratifying, even if the experience is secondhand, through a period-piece artifact. To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape, an exhibition that opened this week at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, offers an opportunity do just that. Bringing together more than 50 works by well- and lesser-known artists — mostly from Britain and the US, with contributions as well by colleagues in Canada and Scandinavia — the show pays homage to the great age of polar landscape painting, when the world, at least at its extremities, felt both mysterious and dangerous and when nature could still put up a fight.

The heyday of this distinctive genre of landscape painting lasted from about 1830 to 1930, coinciding with those heroic expeditions whose mission was to map the last uncharted regions of the globe. Throughout this late chapter of the age of global exploration, artists were on hand to record these encounters with the frozen regions of the earth.

Lagging behind the true pathfinders — but occasionally in their company, like the pioneering William Hodges, who from 1772 to ’75 sailed with Capt. James Cook and painted one of the earliest images of an iceberg — these adventurous artists brought home images of jaw-dropping splendor and desolation.

During much of the period the artist’s ambition was to dramatise human inadequacy in a world that was, if not openly hostile, at the least uncaring. The era of polar exploration coincided with that of the Romantic sublime, when artists, bored by prosaic views of country lanes and ramshackle cottages, searched for vistas that would stir the souls of their viewers and force them to confront their own mortality. Painters found in the stark beauty and omnipresent peril of the polar regions a narrative drama that seemed tailor made for metaphysical inquiry.