?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
ROCKWELL KENT. Group of 2 trial title-pages and 1 dust jacket design for Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska. Pen and ink or watercolor on paper. Unsigned but with Kent's pencil annotation on one piece. Ex-collection Arthur Price with his pencil annotations on mattes. Sizes indicated. 1919
Two trial title-pages for Wilderness. 279x209 mm; 11x8 1/4 on tissue. with circular vignette and Kent's trial lettering vertically along right margin and within actual design. Corner mounted larger sheet of paper at upper corners Second trial title-page 267x203 mm; 10 1/2x8 inches on paper. Pencil marks and faint strike visible; light overall toning Portion of title-page and dust jacket layout. Ink on paper lettering and hourglass vignettes collaged on board 83x222 mm; 3 1/4x8 3/4 inches. Contains Kent's annotation in lower left "Leave only quarter with margin around drawing." Other pencil notes in another hand. Hinged to mount.
Arthur Price was among Kent's many lifelong patrons and collectors who included Dunan Phillips, Carl Zigosser, and Merle Armitage. He was the mail order sales manager of Sears, Roebuck & Co. in the years surrounding World War II and later became president of the Pennsylvania General Paper Corporation. Throughout the 1940s, he assembled a diverse collection of Kent's works on paper which contained numerous study drawings and watercolors conceived primarily in Alaska and Greenland, many obtained directly from Kent. Price, whom Kent mentions in his autobiography "It's Me O Lord" (pages 560, 564-66), was an also an illustrator and adventurer in his own right. He died only three months after Kent in 1971.
