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INTRODUCTION
During the 88 years of his life, Rockwell Kent achieved equal prominence as a painter, writer, traveler, and social polemicist. Louis Untermeyer, writing in the Special Rockwell Kent Number of American Book Collector, summer, 1964, proclaimed him âthe most versatile man alive ... I have known him as a painter, pamphleteer, poet (in private), politician (a poor one), propagandist, lecturer, explorer, architect (he re-designed my home in the Adirondacks), grave-digger, farmer, illustrator, Great-Dane-breeder, typographic designer, xylographer (âwood-engraverâ to the uninitiated), friend, and general stimulator.â To a large segment of the public, however, he is remembered as the most important American book illustrator of his time, primarily for the works he illustrated during the twenties and thirtiesâCandide, Moby Dick, The Canterbury Tales and the complete Shakespeare, as well as his own books of travel.
This period was marked by frenetic activity in the production and collecting of limited editions and fine printing. Kentâs thorough understanding of typographic design, his individual, precise style of formalized realism and his techniques, so sympathetic to the printed page, made him the ideal illustrator for the kind of books appreciated by discriminating collectors. Most of his illustrated books were first published in expensive, superbly produced limited, signed editions, followed by more popularly priced trade editions having tremendous sales. Besides the then prevailing practice of issuing limited editions of fine books at higher prices, to defray the high cost of production, âspecial copiesâ with wider margins, extra plates, deluxe bindings, and other desiderata attractive to collectors were often published to bring in additional income. Rockwell Kentâs books were no exception, and they present a difficult problem for bibliographers.
Kent also had the gift for creating simple, compact vignettes of strong design admirably adaptable to page decorations, signets, and bookplates; he produced a great number of bookplates, much admired and assiduously collected, and two collections containing both bookplates and marks were published in limited editions, one in 1929 and the other in 1937. In addition, he contributed much outstanding work to numerous distinguished advertising campaigns.
Rockwell Kent was born June 21, 1882, at Tarrytown Heights, New York. That he chose to come into the world so early as four oâclock in the morning possibly suggests a proclivity and fund of energy which was to mark his entire life. He began his formal education at Horace Mann School in New York City. Later he wrote in Itâs Me O Lord: The Autobiography of Rockwell Kent (Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, 1955), âMechanical drawing was important in our curriculum; and, again, the high degree of craftsmanship that it demandedâof accuracy of measurement, of sheer draughtmanship in terms of utmost precisionânot only served, however unsuspectedly by me, to incline me toward my eventual profession, but to train my hand for service to it. But of even greater importance was the stark, material realism of which such drawing is the expression. Our concern was not with what things looked like but with, what in all their dimensions, they essentially were.â
Of his early training there in fine art he writes causticallyâand characteristicallyâthat his generation was happily spared âall the silly, sensual indulgence in irresponsible self-expression that, from messy âfinger paintingâ to often messier abstractionism, characterizes much of the therapeutic school of art of today.â In school he developed a good Spencerian hand, and his ability to write well and embellish what he wrote with fanciful letters and decorative borders was quickly recognized and put to use. At fifteen he began to practice as a professional, receiving small commissions suitable to his talents.
Kent studied architecture at Columbia University, briefly practiced the profession, and set himself up as an expert on architectural rendering. Finding the work unrewarding, he turned his attention more and more to painting. He had already started to study painting under William Merritt Chase in the summer of 1900. He later went to the New York School of Art, established by Douglas John Connah, a fine man and painter who has received much less credit than he deserves. There he studied under Chase,...
