?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
ROCKWELL KENT Forest Pool.
Wood engraving, 1927. 141x205 mm; 5 1/2x8 inches, full margins. Edition of 150. Signed in pencil, lower right. A very good, evenly-printed impression.
Kent (1882-1971) is among the most celebrated American printmakers of the 20th century and widely considered a master of the wood engraving technique. He produced nearly 50 exquisitely-rendered and technically complex wood engravings, along with numerous wood engraved illustrations for major publications; Forest Pool ranks among the most iconic of his works.
A transcendentalist and mystic in the tradition of Thoreau and Emerson, whose works he read, Kent found inspiration in the austerity and stark beauty of wilderness. He lived for extended periods of time in Minnesota (1912–1913), Newfoundland (1914–15), Alaska (1918–19), Vermont (1919–1925), Tierra del Fuego (1922–23), Ireland (1926) and Greenland (1929; 1931–32; 1934–35). His series of land and seascapes from these often forbidding locales convey the Symbolist spirit evoking the mysteries and cosmic wonders of the natural world. "I don't want petty self-expression", Kent wrote, "I want the elemental, infinite thing; I want to paint the rhythm of eternity." Burne-Jones 14.
