Rockwell Kent (1882–1971)

This book is full of great paintings; a wonderful volume to enjoy on a snowy day. Rockwell as an art critic......I just can't agree with him on a lot of things. I also have to question him for inaccuracies; when he is bitching about "Monna Pomona", he goes off on a rant about the personal life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his relationship with Eleanor Siddal. Okay, close, she was Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, known as Lizzie, but shouldn't an art critic keep this stuff straight, especially when the woman was a sort of supermodel to the Pre-Rapaelites?

Oh, and by the way, whoever stole the print of Albert Joseph Moore's "A Summer Night" from this piece of public property......shame on you!… (meer)

In the closing months of the Great War during the autumn of 1918, an artist and his 9 year-old son turned their backs on "civilization" and spent about 6 months on a remote island in Alaska. The father painted and read Homer while the son chased foxes and ran around in the snow exploring the island. It's a beautiful little book that captures the mood of the time and place. It reminded me of going with my father to a fishing camp in Canada years ago (the camp we went to was built in the 1920s). By this time the recent improvements of the small marine outboard motor, and the airplane, made it possible for more people to travel the waterways of the northern wilderness without mounting a long expedition and so began a new tourist industry of which Kent was among the first wave.

The book is illustrated by Kent including a Robert Louis Stevenson-like map of the island and surrounding areas with hand written notes, it's evocative of adventure. It's a real place that is easily found just outside Seward on Google Maps. I listened to the book read by David Wales of LibriVox and it's also freely available on Internet Archive.… (meer)

N by E is a near perfect reading experience: a fascinating story, a captivating writing style, consistently beautiful and abundant illustrations, and all brought together in a striking hardcover edition. Rockwell Kent, to paraphrase a common description of the wolverine, was 500 pounds of attitude in a 150 pound body. He was most imposing when he encountered (or fomented his own) adversity. This 1929 voyage from Nova Scotia to Greenland in a 10 meter boat, in the company of a shipmate that he held in utter contempt, provides ample adversity for Kent and his writing to come alive. Here he describes the night watch:

Invariably as the darkness came, the sky was overcast with fog or cloud; and instead of exulting in the splendor of starlit heavens I shivered through interminable hours in the contemplation of nothing at all, yet ever straining my mind toward the annihilation of time and the achievement of some helpful disbelief in the reality of my bodily misery. It was cold - oh, bitterly!

Once they "hit" Greenland, the story and the writing wane, in fact his interactions with the Greenlanders, seen through a modern lens, leave one feeling somewhat uneasy.
Nevertheless, with its mix of prose and pictures, the book is a wonderfully immersive experience. As Kent serves up meals in stormy seas, jury rigs broken gaff jaws, learns on the fly to navigate unerringly across the foggy expanse of the Labrador Sea, and all of this in addition to writing, painting, drawing, and even playing the flute, one is awed by how capable and gifted a man he was. Truly, as has been said about him, he was someone with a way of "getting things done".… (meer)

This is a recounting of a tranquil fall and winter spent on a remote Alaskan island in 1918-19. The party consisted of a father and his 9 year old son, both named Rockwell Kent. Not much happens, but they are just so happy fending for themselves during their wilderness stay that it makes for a pleasant read. Although Kent's art in this book is generally not as strong as it is in other works like N by E, some of the illustrations give the book an enchanted feel, particularly the fabulously detailed map of their island in the front and back endpapers. The overall mood conveyed by the book is one of peace, likely a rare and precious gift in those years: "It was for us life as it should be, serene and wholesome; love - but no hate, faith without disillusionment, the absolute for the toiling hands of man and his soaring spirit."… (meer)