Nowadays the Chicago University Press has brought out a handsome volume of Rockwell Kent prints. This name is known to majority of Americans. The woodcuts, lithographs, copper and wood engravings have taken cleanly to the matted paper. The layout and design are not only pleasing but practical – no bits and pieces of text or illustration into spine. An artist and writer and internationally honored as master of these crafts, Rockwell Kent was also an architect, carpenter, farmer, explorer, adventurer and humanitarian. A man of formidable vitality, he had a keen sense of humor and an abiding love of people. He would say that the true artist didn’t think about himself – although every creative work must be an expression of its creator. He was born in Tarrytown, New York. He later named his home Asgaard in honor of the home of the gods in Norse mythology. His early paintings of Mount Monadhock and New Hampshire were first shown at the Society American Artists in New York in 1904. By the way, it was he who illustrated the poetry by Walt Whitman ‘Leaves of Grass’.

Rockwell Kent’s technique is faultless – lines of drawings are clean, forms are sharp – no tricks or fads. In every work one can find integrity and perfectness. These qualities have placed him among the very best painters of all times. But he called himself ‘a painter of pictures’ and in his last years he concentrated on palette and brush. The Kent style is as recognizable in his oils as in his prints – especially his oils of the so- named Greenland. His Alaska’s landscapes are still impressing people of all the ages. Dan Burne Jones, whom Kent appointed as his official bibliographer, selected more than 300 prints. He also wrote the introduction and textual descriptions to the book Greenland, works that are political statements and personal representations on mankind and work.