Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) is one of the most respected printmakers of American art.  Kent's paintings, lithographs, and woodcuts often portray the wildness of nature, and have been reproduced in books, prints and other formats widely.  Kent attended the Horace Mann School and Columbia University, and studied art under William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Abbott Thayer. With encouragement from Henri, Kent went to Monhegan Island to paint. He was absorbed in the awesome power of the environment, and his relationship with the sea became a recurring theme in his work.

A political activist, Rockwell Kent championed social causes from the 1930's until his death. Although Kent insisted that he never belonged to the Communist party, his consistent support of radical causes contributed to a decline in his artistic popularity during the 1940s and 1950s. In the latter decade, the State Department revoked his passport. Kent sued for its reinstatement and emerged victorious in landmark Supreme Court case. He became very popular in the Soviet Union, and in 1957, half a million Russians attended an exhibition of his work. Subsequently, he donated eighty paintings and eight hundred prints and drawings to the Russian people. In 1967, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.

The graphic art tradition in which Rockwell Kent worked was not that of the Post-Impressionist or abstract International style, but rather an older and somewhat English style. Hogarth, Blake, Constable, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the British illustrators were his artistic antecedents. His work is most frequently identified with that of the American Social Realists and the great muralists of the 1920s and 1930s.
 
 

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Squires, Frederick writing as Tom Thumtack. ARCHITECTONICS: The Tales of Tom Thumtack, Architect. Illustrated with 85 unsigned drawings, including the color frontispiece and title page designs, and some decorative initials by Rockwell Kent. New York: William T. Comstock, 1914. First edition. The first appearance of Rockwell Kent illustrations in book form, a series of drawings that Kent turned out to accompany an amusing collection of architectural stories written by his friend Frederick Squires, a classmate of Kent's at Columbia. Bound in blue cloth-covered boards with a Rockwell Kent illustration in gilt and orange stamping on the front board. A bit edgeworn, esp. to top and bottom of spine, otherwise a beautiful copy.  VG.  <SOLD>