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Lot Essay
In May 1922, Rockwell Kent traveled to the southernmost point of South America, Tierra del Fuego. As the artist recounted, the trip was a spur of the minute decision to escape New York City: "Within ten minutes of the thought I was aboard a subway, bound for down-town. And a half hour later I was shaking the hand of Joe Grace, thanking him for his promise of a passage on a Grace Line Freighter to the port nearest to Cape Horn, Punta Arenas, Chile. Thank God! And now to work." (It's Me O Lord, New York, 1955, p. 357)
Once he arrived, Kent and a Norwegian mariner Ole Ytterock, known as Willie, adapted an old lifeboat into a sailboat with plans to explore down and around Cape Horn. Kent primarily made sketches during the adventurous journey, which he adapted into illustrations for Voyaging: Southward from the Strait of Magellan (1924). Richard V. West explains, "Some of the sketches also became the basis for larger paintings undertaken after his return to the United States. Virgin Peaks, Tierra del Fuego, painted over a period of five years, is an example of one of these large canvases. The composition is a favorite one: the waterline bisects the painting, with the hills and mountains reflected in the water." ("An Enkindled Eye": The Paintings of Rockwell Kent, p. 21)
Not only a quintessential Kent composition delighting in the reflections of the snowy mountaintops, Virgin Peaks, Tierra del Fuego also epitomizes the Modernist abstraction of the landscape that makes Kent's work so compelling, whether it be of Southern Patagonia, Alaska or Greenland. Indeed, Scott Ferris writes of Kent's painting Parry Harbor: Tierra del Fuego (Kiev Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Ukraine), "we see organic form and color that differs little from the work of Kent's contemporaries Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley." (Rockwell Kent's Forgotten Landscapes, p. 80)
Once he arrived, Kent and a Norwegian mariner Ole Ytterock, known as Willie, adapted an old lifeboat into a sailboat with plans to explore down and around Cape Horn. Kent primarily made sketches during the adventurous journey, which he adapted into illustrations for Voyaging: Southward from the Strait of Magellan (1924). Richard V. West explains, "Some of the sketches also became the basis for larger paintings undertaken after his return to the United States. Virgin Peaks, Tierra del Fuego, painted over a period of five years, is an example of one of these large canvases. The composition is a favorite one: the waterline bisects the painting, with the hills and mountains reflected in the water." ("An Enkindled Eye": The Paintings of Rockwell Kent, p. 21)
Not only a quintessential Kent composition delighting in the reflections of the snowy mountaintops, Virgin Peaks, Tierra del Fuego also epitomizes the Modernist abstraction of the landscape that makes Kent's work so compelling, whether it be of Southern Patagonia, Alaska or Greenland. Indeed, Scott Ferris writes of Kent's painting Parry Harbor: Tierra del Fuego (Kiev Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Ukraine), "we see organic form and color that differs little from the work of Kent's contemporaries Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley." (Rockwell Kent's Forgotten Landscapes, p. 80)