Rockwell Kent
American (1882-1971)
Date:
1935-1960
Medium:
Oil on canvas
Size:
Width: 43 3/4 ”
Height: 33 1/2″

Rockwell Kent’s icy color palette and sharp, flattened forms are tempered here by an addition to the painting made some 25 years after its completion. Around 1960, at the request of the then-owner, Kent added an image of himself at work in the snow surrounded by sled dogs. The artist lived a life of robust adventure fueled by his interest in Transcendentalism, a religious and philosophical movement that stressed the independence of the self-reliant individual.

The stark beauty of the wilderness was a common subject for Kent. He painted austere modernist landscapes in New England, Minnesota, Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, Ireland, and Greenland, where he spent several painting campaigns between 1929 and 1935. Although Kent viewed Greenland’s society as an egalitarian utopia, he benefited from colonial hierarchies of power while living in Illorsuit. He depended on the Greenlandic Inuit people to survive, though they are notably absent from this landscape.

Purchase with exchange funds from the Edward Joseph Gallagher III Memorial Collection BMA 1991.10