Vintage 1940s Kent "Winter, A View of Monhegan" Landscape Art Print

A 12" x 9" reproduction of Rockwell Kent's Winter, A View of Monhegan as a part of a late 1940s collection of the "World's Great Paintings" with title and commentary on reverse of the print and in description below.

Winter, A View of Monhegan

RocKWELL KENT (American School 1882-)

RocKweLL KeNT was born in Tarrytown Heights, New York, began the study of painting at fifteen under William M. Chase, and continued under Robert Henri, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Abbott Thayer. By nature a wanderer, or perhaps not so much a wanderer as a seeker of places in harmony with his own nature, he has lived at various times in Alaska and Greenland. In a number of books notable for their simplicity and serenity

- Wilderness, Voyaging, N by E, Salamina-he has written of his voyages and experiences. In the last mentioned book, a story of life in northern Greenland, he gives us the key to the pleasure we feel in the presence of his best works: "The beauty of these northern winter days is more remote and passionless, more nearly absolute, than any other beauty that I know.

Blue sky, white world, and the golden light of the sun to tune the whiteness to the sun-illumined blue. If we personify the sun and feel for it in its incessant toil of making varicolored things to harmonize-red barns fit summer landscapes, wild roses go with buttercups, of making harmony where purposeful disharmony prevails-what vast delight we must believe it to experience in shining down on snow. 'I who am nothing,' whispers that prone whiteness, 'partake of you, dear sun, and of the blue heaven in which you shine, and become beautiful.' In Greenland one discovers, 'as though for the first time, what beauty is. God must forgive me that I tried to paint it."

Beauty remote and passionless-that is what we experience in Rockwell Kent's canvases; serenity and repose; nature seen through, rather than with, the eye. Winter, A View of Monbegan, which may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is a fine example of his early work.

EDWIN SEAVER