Rockwell Kent
American, 1882 - 1971
Birth-PlaceTarrytown, NY
Death-PlacePlattsburgh, NY
BiographyRockwell Kent (1882-1971)Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York, and received his earliest artistic training from an aunt who was a successful ceramics decorator. In 1900, at the age of eighteen, Kent enrolled in the summer art program taught by William Merritt Chase at Shinnecock, Long Island. Kent’s talents were quickly recognized by Chase, who offered the young artist a scholarship to the New York School of Art. Reluctantly bowing to family pressure, Kent declined the scholarship and instead enrolled as an architectural student at Columbia University. By 1902, dissatisfied with his studies, Kent accepted the scholarship and enrolled in night classes taught by Robert Henri. Kent’s fellow students included George Bellows and Edward Hopper. Henri’s charismatic personality and inspired teaching galvanized Kent. His artistic horizons were further widened in 1903 by a summer apprenticeship to Abbott H. Thayer in Dublin, New Hampshire. The same year, Kent gave up his architectural studies entirely to become a full-time art student, studying with Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller.
In 1905, at the suggestion of Henri, the young artist visited Monhegan Island, Maine, where he built a studio that became his home for the next five years. He returned to New York and participated in the famous Exhibition of Independent Artists, organized by Henri in 1910. Unhappy with urban life and eagerly embracing the challenge of cold and desolate places, Kent sojourned in Newfoundland (1914-15), Alaska (1918-19), Tierra del Fuego (1922), France (1925), Ireland (1926-27), and Greenland (1929, 1931-32, and 1934-35). The artist’s wanderlust was recorded in a series of memorable landscapes. In 1928 he purchased a farm in the Adirondack Mountains near Au Sable Forks, New York. Named Asgaard (the Nordic home of the gods), it served as Kent's home base and as the subject of many paintings.
Early in his career, Kent had so successfully established himself as a graphic artist that his reputation as illustrator and printmaker eventually overshadowed his accomplishments as a painter. He wrote, designed, and illustrated a series of books devoted to his travels (Wilderness, 1920; Voyaging, 1924; N by E, 1930; Salamina, 1935; Greenland Journal, 1962) and gained wide recognition for his clean immaculate drawing style in such books as “Candide” (1927) and “Moby Dick” (1930). His masterly wood engravings, inspired by artists as varied as William Blake and Eric Gill, were much imitated during the 1920s and 1930s.
After World War II, Kent subordinated his activities as an artist to his social activism. Ever militant, Kent had been a Socialist in his youth, organized artist groups during the Depression, painted a controversial post-office mural in 1937, and was an outspoken supporter of the Soviet Union. As a result, his books were banned from American libraries abroad, he was subpoenaed by the McCarthy Committee, and his passport was suspended. In 1958 his passport was returned, and his right to travel abroad was restored. In 1960 the artist donated more than eighty of his paintings to the Soviet Union, which were distributed among various museums.
Despite these travails, Kent continued to paint until his death in 1971. In recent years, renewed interest in Kent’s work is evident in new editions of his books and in comprehensive exhibitions of his paintings and graphic work.
“Toilers of the Sea” (Toiling on the Sea), 1907
Oil on canvas, 38 1/8 x 44 1/8 in. (96.8 x 112.1 cm)
Signed and dated (lower left): “Rockwell Kent”. / 1907--
Charles F. Smith Fund (1944.1)
Toilers of the Sea is perhaps the most monumental of the seascapes and landscapes painted by Rockwell Kent while he lived on Monhegan Island between 1905 and 1910. Two and one-half square miles in area, the island is situated in the Atlantic Ocean approximately ten miles off the coast of southern Maine. Settled by colonists in 1622, Monhegan soon developed into a thriving, albeit small, fishing community. In the late nineteenth century the island became a popular summer destination for tourists and artists attracted by its isolation, primitive accommodations, and picturesque setting. Kent arrived on Monhegan in June 1905, drawn there by the enthusiastic recommendation of his teacher, Robert Henri. Unlike most artists who visited Monhegan for a brief summer painting expedition, Kent elected to remain there, supporting himself as a lobsterman, carpenter, and well digger. Painting outdoors whenever possible, he captured the island in all its seasons and moods. Although Kent made frequent trips to the Berkshires, New Hampshire, and New York during this period, the Monhegan experience was the prime shaping force in his life and career. He later called it “my first great adventure in living.”(1)
The results of the first two years of work on Monhegan were presented in April 1907 at the Clausen Galleries in New York . Fourteen paintings were shown, among them “Toilers of the Sea’. The exhibition drew at least one ecstatic review: “Donnerwetter! but [Kent] knocks you off your pins before you can sit down with these broad, realistic, powerful representations of weltering seas, men laboring in boats, rude, rocky headlands and snow-bound landscapes. . . . The paint is laid on by an athlete of the brush. . . . We noted with admiration such canvases as. . . ’Toiling on the Sea’ --- thrilling in color, movement, and mood. . . . Those fishermen in their cockleshell crafts on a sea that is tumbling like tornado clouds, those fellows out there under the lee of that harsh pile of rocks are rendered with a fidelity that tells of a big grip on essentials.”(2) The artist John Sloan visited the exhibition and later noted in his diary: “Splendid big thoughts. Some like big prayers to God. I enjoyed them to the utmost and accept them as great. I’d like to buy some of them.”(3) George Bellows wrote admiringly about the exhibition to a friend and later did Kent the supreme honor of modeling a Monhegan painting of his own after “Toilers of the Sea”.(4)
Although the exhibition brought Kent critical acclaim and acceptance as a major talent, it was not a financial success. As Kent wryly noted in a letter written some four decades later: “No picture was sold. I gave a couple of them to friends, one of these being ‘Winter’ which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. The majority of the pictures were a lot of thirteen for which with their frames (costly gold leaf) William Macbeth gave me $500.00 as an act of great kindness at a time when the illness of my wife and a child put me in great need. Most of these pictures are now in American museums.”(5)
While Kent was active on Monhegan, Winslow Homer was still painting in his secluded studio at Prout’s Neck, Maine. Kent greatly admired Homer’s epic seascapes, painted the previous two decades.(6) His spirit hovers over Kent’s Monhegan paintings and is particularly evident in “Toilers of the Sea”. The images of the fishermen struggling in the waves are strikingly similar to those depicted in Homer’s “Fog Warning”(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and “Herring Net” (Art Institute of Chicago), both of 1885. The connection to Homer was not lost on contemporary critics, one of whom hailed Kent as “a worthy successor to the master of Prout’s Neck, whose rugged, rock-ribbed coast he has depicted with forthright simplicity and directness that has something of the stark actuality and bitter tang of the sea itself.”(7) Despite this affinity, however, the focus and emphasis of “Toilers of the Sea” are entirely Kent’s own. Homer's works underscore human endeavor, with the figures central to the composition. In “Toilers of the Sea”, the towering rock and the sea dominate the composition, dwarfing the boats and men. This intention is supported by the artist’s original title for the painting, “Toiling on the Sea”, which stresses the act of work, not the participants themselves.(8) Kent’s colors are brighter and more specific than Homer’s, creating a more cheerful, less foreboding atmosphere. The ordering of the landscape elements reflects Kent’s architectural training as well as the influence of Kenneth Hayes Miller, one of his early teachers. Kent found Miller’s emphasis on the formal elements of painting an important antidote to the more emotive and ad hoc approach advocated by Henri.(9)
“Toilers of the Sea” represents a brilliant moment in Kent’s career, when youthful fervor balanced a keen command of painterly technique. Although Kent continued to paint significant works during his long career, he never recaptured the sense of romantic ardor and joie de vivre that so vividly animate the sea, sky, and men in this canvas.
RVW
Bibliography:
Rockwell Kent and Carl Zigrosser, “Rockwellkentiana” (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933); Rockwell Kent, “It’s Me O Lord: The Autobiography of Rockwell Kent” ( New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955); Dan Burne Jones, “The Prints of Rockwell Kent: A Catalogue Raisonné” (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975); David Traxel, “An American Saga: The Life and Times of Rockwell Kent” (New York: Harper and Row, 1980); Fridolf Johnson, ed., “Rockwell Kent: An Anthology of His Work” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Richard V. West, “An Enkindled Eye: The Paintings of Rockwell Kent”, exhib. cat. (Santa Barbara, Cal.: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1985).
Notes:
. Kent and Zigrosser, “Rockwellkentiana”, p.10.
2. James Huneker, “Around the Galleries,” Sun, April 5, 1907, p. 8. The exhibition opened April 1, 1907, and ran for two weeks.
3. Entry for April 13, 1907, in Bruce St. John, ed., “John Sloan’s New York Scene” (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 121.
4. “Evening Swell” (1911; formerly Charles H. Morgan Collection, Amherst, Mass.). About Kent’s paintings, Bellows wrote: “Each is for itself. They are not decorations for a wall but works of art, expressions of powerful ideas which have not the least thing in the world to do with decorating the home” (Bellows to Joseph Taylor, letter, April 21, 1910, Amherst College Library).
5. Rockwell Kent to the New Britain Museum of American Art, letter, August 24, 1950, NBMAA files. William Macbeth was a leading dealer and advocate of American art in New York. It was in his gallery that The Eight had their momentous debut in 1908. The transaction to which Kent refers in his letter took place in 1911. “Toilers of the Sea” was one the of paintings chosen by Macbeth in a group that also included “Down to the Sea” (Brooklyn Museum of Art) and “Burial of a Young Man”(Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.).
6. Kent's appreciation of Homer is described in Bruce Robertson, “Reckoning with Winslow Homer: His Late Paintings and Their Influence” (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990), pp. 101-06.
7. John E. D. Trask and J. Nilsen Laurvik, eds., “Catalogue Deluxe of the Department of Fine Arts, Panama-Pacific International Exhibition”, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1915), vol. 1, p. 22.
8. The change in title appears to have occurred after 1933, when the work was published as “Toiling on the Sea” in “Rockwellkentiana” (unnumbered illustration), but prior to the painting’s purchase by NBMAA in 1944. It may not have been sanctioned by the artist. The current title pays homage to the work of another American artist, Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose well-known painting “Toilers of the Sea” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) dates about 1884. Ryder’s title, in turn, was presumably drawn from Victor Hugo’s 1866 novel “Travailleurs de la mer”, published in English as “Toilers of the Sea”.
9. Kent characterized Miller’s influence: “As Chase had taught us just to use our eyes, and Henri to enlist our hearts, now Miller called on us to use our heads. . . . Miller exacted a recognition of the tactile qualities of paint and of the elements of composition--line and mass--not as a means towards the re-creation of life but as the fulfillment of an end, aesthetic pleasure” (Kent, It’s Me O Lord, p. 83).
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