Rockwell Kent photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1933

Rockwell Kent (June 21 1882–March 13 1971) was an American artist, illustrator and author.

Biography

Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York, lived much of his early life in and around New York, and moved in his mid-40s to the Adirondacks where he lived the second half of his life. He studied with the influential painters and theorists of his day, including Arthur Wesley Dow, William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, Abbott Thayer, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. An undergraduate background in architecture at Columbia University enabled Kent to work occasionally in the 1900s and 1910s as a draftsman and carpenter.

Kent's early paintings of Mount Monadnock and New Hampshire were first shown at the Society of American Artists in New York in 1904. In 1905 he ventured to Monhegan Island, Maine, where he based himself for the next five years. His first series of paintings of Monhegan were shown in 1907 at Clausen Galleries in New York to wide critical acclaim, and they form the foundation of his lasting reputation as an early modernist. In 1918-19 Kent and his eldest son ventured to Alaska where he painted and wrote Wilderness (1920), his first of several adventure memoirs. Upon his return, George Palmer Putnam and others formed a corporation ("Rockwell Kent, Inc.") which supported the artist in his new Vermont homestead where he completed his paintings from Alaska. A transcendentalist and mystic, Kent painted remote and austere lands, including Newfoundland (1914-15), Tierra del Fuego (1922-23), and Greenland (1929; 1931-32; 1934-35).

Approached in 1926 by publisher R. R. Donnelley to produce an illustrated edition of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, Kent suggested Moby Dick instead. Published in 1930 by the Lakeside Press of Chicago, the three-volume limited edition filled with Kent's pen-and-ink drawings and title-page copper engravings sold out immediately; Random House produced a trade edition which was also immensely popular. A previously obscure book, Moby Dick was rediscovered by critics in the 1920s. The success of the Rockwell Kent illustrated edition was a factor in its becoming recognized as the classic it is today.

Little known is Kent's talent as a jazz age humorist. As the gifted pen-and-ink draftsman "Hogarth, Jr.", Kent created a wealth of whimsical and irreverent drawings published by Vanity Fair, Harper's Weekly, and the original Life. In 1930, Kent was approached by Vernon Kilns to create china designs, adapting many of his book illustrations for pitchers, plates, and other dishes.

As the Second World War approached, Kent shifted his priorities, and became active in progressive politics. In 1938 the U.S. Post Office asked him to paint a mural in their headquarters in Washington, DC; Kent included (in Inuit dialect and in tiny letters) an antigovernment statement in the painting, which caused some consternation ^[1]. In 1939, he joined the Harlem Lodge of the International Workers Order (IWO), a pro-Communist fraternal organization. A lithograph by Kent became the organization's logo in 1940, and, from 1944 to 1953, he served as the organization's President.

As a consequence of his outspoken leftist beliefs and the rise of abstract expressionism, Kent's reputation in the United States declined in the 1950s and 1960s, and he became a target of McCarthyism. In 1960 Kent donated several hundred paintings and drawings to the Soviet people, which responded by making him an honorary member of their academy of Fine Arts and awarding him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967. (Although many believe that Kent donated the prize money to the people of North Vietnam, an interview with Kent's wife Sally that appears in a 2006 documentary about his life states that he donated it to the women and children of Vietnam, both North and South.)

When Kent died, The New York Times described him as "... a thoughtful, troublesome, profoundly independent, odd and kind man who made an imperishable contribution to the art of bookmaking in the United States."

In 2001, Kent was featured in a U.S. Post Office commemorative stamp series honoring American illustrators, including Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, Frederic Remington, and 16 others.

The story of Kent's time in Newfoundland is fictionally depicted by Canadian author Michael Winter his 2004 Winterset Award-winning novel The Big Why.

Works

Written and illustrated by Rockwell Kent

Kent was a prolific writer. His more important works include:

• Voyaging Southwards from the Strait of Magellan — About Kent's travels in Tierra del Fuego.
• — About the year Kent and his young son spent living on Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, Alaska.
• N by E — About Kent's voyage (and shipwreck) from New York to Greenland.
• Salamina — About the year Kent spent living and working in Igdlorssuit, Greenland.
• It's Me, O Lord — The Autobiography of Rockwell Kent (1955)
• This is My Own — An autobiographical account of Kent's early years in the Adirondacks with his second wife Frances. (1940)

Beowulf and Grendel's Mother, by Rockwell Kent in his illustrated 1932 edition of Beowulf

Illustrated by Rockwell Kent

• Beowulf - illustrated by Kent, 1932 [1]
• City Child — poetry by Selma Robinson
• The Mountains Wait — dust jacket only
• Seed — novel by Charles Norris — dust jacket only
• Zest — novel by Charles Norris — dust jacket only
• Candy — novel
• Moby Dick — novel by Herman Melville
• Leaves of Grass — poetry by Walt Whitman
• Erewhon — novel by Samuel Butler
• Candide — novel by Voltaire
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey — novel by Thornton Wilder
• Faust — by Goethe
• Paul Bunyan — novel by Esther Shephard
• A Treasury of Sea Stories — anthology edited by Gordon C. Aymar
• Gisli's Saga — Mediaeval Icelandic saga
• Autumn Leaves — social commentary by P W Litchfield
• Canterbury Tales
• The Decameron — novel by Giovanni Boccaccio
• The Complete Works of Shakespeare

References

• Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2002.
• World Authors 1900–1950. The H. W. Wilson Company, 1996.

Further reading

• Wien, Jake Milgram, "Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern", Hudson Hills Press, 2005.
• Traxel, David, An American Saga: The Life and Times of Rockwell Kent, New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
• Johnson, Fridolf. Rockwell Kent: An Anthology of His Works New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1982.
• Johnson, Fridolf. "The Illustrations of Rockwell Kent: 231 examples from Books, Magazines, and Advertising Art." New York: Dover Publications, 1976
• Roberts, Don. "Rockwell Kent: The Art of the Bookplate." San Francisco: Fair Oaks Press, 2003.
• Priess, David. "Rockwell Kent" American Artist 36, no. 364 (November 1972)
• Jones, Dan Burne. "The Prints of Rockwell Kent: A Catalogue Raisonné." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975.
• Arens, Egmont. "Rockwell Kent-Illustrator" The Book Collector's Packet. 1.9 (1932)

External links

• Rockwell Kent Gallery and Collection at Plattsburgh State University of New York
• Brief online biography
• Adirondack Vistas in the Artist's Eye and in the Visitor's
• Rockwell Kent Artwork Examples on AskART.
• Photos of the Random House edition of Moby Dick Illustrated by Rockwell Kent
• Rockwell Kent papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

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