Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a historian and writer who lives in Middlesex.
Life magazine ran a photograph in 1937 of an artist painting a farm scene with the caption, “The summer artist lurks along every Vermont roadside ever since Rockwell Kent moved in a decade or so ago and made Vermont landscapes famous.”
Actually, by the time the photo appeared, Kent had been gone from Vermont for more than a decade. If his time here helped make Vermont landscapes famous, it also made him famous.
Kent arrived in Vermont in 1919, freshly returned from an eight-month painting trip to Alaska with his 9-year-old son, Rockwell III. While in Alaska, the two Rockwell Kents shared a rustic existence, living in a former goat shack on an island 17 miles off the coast.
Kent viewed the time in Alaska as a personal quest. “This sojourn in the wilderness is in no sense an artist’s junket in search of picturesque material for brush or pencil,” he wrote, “but the flight to freedom of a man who detests the petty quarrels and bitterness of the crowded world.”
Kent wanted to extract himself from the busyness of modern life as much as possible. For professional reasons, he still occasionally needed to meet and mingle with people in New York City’s art world, but he didn’t have to like it or live there.
“I am determined in my return to get out of the city,” he wrote in a letter. “If I can manage it, I will take my family to some remote country place in New England.”
Upon returning to the East Coast, Rockwell and his wife, Kathleen, traveled by train from New York to Bennington. From there, they planned to travel north until they found a place that felt like home. They didn’t have to go far. A scant 15 miles.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher — a best-selling American author in the early decades of the 20th century — was instrumental in the Kents’ move to Vermont. The novelist had moved to the town of Arlington a dozen years earlier and was an indefatigable promoter of the state as a great place to do creative work.
The Kents saw a dilapidated old farmhouse for sale in Arlington. It sat on 200 acres, a mile up from the main road. With a little work, the house would be just what they were after. But the owner was asking $2,300 — more than twice what the Kents could afford. Fisher stepped forward to loan the Kents $1,300 and offered them a place to stay while the house was being renovated.
Kent dubbed the property Egypt, because of local lore that the farm’s crops had once survived a killing frost that ravaged crops on farms in the valley. The farm’s owners had shared their harvest with neighbors in need, which reminded Kent of how Joseph in the Old Testament had saved Egypt during a famine.
Though he was now ensconced in Vermont, Kent’s vision was still focused on Alaska. He set to work finishing engravings to accompany his journal from the trip, which would be published as “Wilderness: A Journey of Quiet Adventure in Alaska.” One critic called the book the best by an American since Walt Whitman’s 1855 masterpiece “Leaves of Grass.”
The book and Kent’s stark landscape paintings of Alaska brought Kent national renown. Vanity Fair magazine inducted a group of celebrities into its hall of fame, including Kent. Charlie Chaplin was one of the other inductees.
With his Alaska work complete, Kent began to investigate his new home state. During his time here, Kent would paint about two dozen landscapes of Vermont, all but a couple of which were views from his studio, which he built high on the hill above his house. From that spot, about a 10- or 15-minute walk from the homestead, Kent could take in magnificent views of Mount Equinox to the north and the Valley of Vermont to the south.
His landscapes, which he executed in an art deco-influenced style, weren’t just pretty pictures, though they were indeed pretty. And they were nothing like the more literal paintings of that other Vermont Rockwell, Norman, who moved to Arlington in 1939.
Kent painted bright, happy landscapes that contained deeper, sometimes darker, psychological elements. Though not traditionally religious, Kent had a strong spiritual streak, which is evident in paintings like “Puritan Church,” which depicts a simple New England church with light beaming down upon it. The field beside the church is dotted with gravestones, raising the question of mortality in an otherwise lovely scene.
In another work, Kent painted a couple sitting on a hillside, Kent’s hillside, with the Valley of Vermont spreading out below. He titled it “Nirvana,” a Sanskrit word that in Hinduism denotes the connection of the human with the divine. Kent wanted his audience to see the landscape as something more than simply quaint.
The realities of life meant Kent had to divide his time between Vermont and New York City, where he socialized with Pulitzers, Whitneys and others who would buy the art he was creating in Vermont. After their first year in Vermont, Kathleen and their five children began spending the school year in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Kents believed in progressive education — indeed, Rockwell III’s time in Alaska was viewed as part of his schooling — and the couple couldn’t find the sort of school they wanted in Arlington.
But the couple’s separation during much of the year may have spoken to an emotional divide between them. Rockwell and Kathleen divorced in 1925. Kathleen got the Arlington house and Rockwell had to move on to find another bit of Nirvana. He found it in the Adirondacks, which he called home for the last 45 years of his life.
Though Kent is still well known in art circles today, he is largely unknown to the general public. His fame may have ebbed because of his left-wing politics. He had been a member of the Socialist Party since 1904, but didn’t start voicing his opinions publicly until later in his career, when his paintings and engravings had brought him great fame.
After World War II, Kent supported friendly relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, and advocated for a nuclear-free world. His positions drew the attention of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he was blacklisted.
Embittered by his treatment, Kent donated hundreds of paintings and drawings to Soviet museums. The Soviet government awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967. He donated the prize money to the women and children of both North and South Vietnam, which were then at war.
But painting, not just politics, remained a passion. After leaving Vermont, Kent made regular painting expeditions to places of raw beauty far from crowded cities — places like Greenland, Ireland, the Canadian Rockies and Tierra del Fuego — where he continued to explore the profound meaning he found in the landscape.