Journal of a Plague Year: Rockwell Kent's World Famous Paintings: From Innocence to Experience

There's something thrilling about finding a lost book from childhood. I had in years past tried and failed to find an art book that my younger brother and I spent no doubt too much time perusing: http://janeaustenandotherwriters.blogspot.com/2020/04/journal-of-plague-year-open-windows.html. A few days ago I located the book on-line without then knowing the author or title: it is Rockland Kent's World Famous Paintings. My used copy has now arrived.

As is often the case, childhood memory exaggerates size. This book is a hefty tome of biblical proportions but not quite as heavy and thick as I had remembered. The volume we had on the coffee table decades ago lacked the wear of this copy. 

I did not learn to read until age six, though everyone else in the world seems to have been poring through Narnia at age four and reading Milton at five, so the heyday of this art book dates to my pre-literate years. At best, I was gazing at it when I had the minimal skills to read a bit of it--ironically, as soon as I could read well enough for chapter books, my need to fill the time by looking at paintings disappeared.

So I was delighted to re-encounter this book with all the advantages of literacy and context. I read Kent's introduction and was so pleased with its kindness and good humor that I looked him up. He was a humane and decent man, an artist who found himself in trouble in the McCarthy years. He had his passport revoked in 1950 for being part of World Peace Council, which launched the Stockholm Appeal calling for nuclear disarmament. As a pacifist myself, this added to a strong sense of identity. In another  serendipity, I was thrilled to find out his former artist's cottage in Maine is on Monhegan Island, just a few miles off the shore from the home of my friend Jane.

Rockwell Kent's Monhegan Bay in Winter. This hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 From Kent's introduction, in which he invites the viewer to have an unmediated encounter with the art on his pages (in other words, to trust one's own instincts), I realized that a young child is a perfect audience for him. Today, as I could not then (not being able to read) I appreciate his light-hearted and humorous disparagement of the stuffy formality of art galleries and his enthusiasm for the freedom that comes from being able to leaf through an art book in the casual comfort of one's own home.  I was also surprised to find out that he did not choose the paintings for the book. He says he would not have picked all of them, but also states he tried not to let us know which ones he didn't like in the comments on each one he wrote with a partner. Only one work is by a woman: a self-portrait with her daughter by Madame Vigee Le Brun. The non-western tradition does not enter in at all--except as far as Kent can insert a few hints. Abstract art is also not on these pages, though Kent does mention Picasso in his introduction.

I had forgotten that a Van Dyke portrait of King Charles I graces the cover. The book is indexed--all by plates as the book has no pagination.  An oddity is the order of the paintings. While they start in the Renaissance and are in roughly chronological sequence, Cezanne, Renoir, and Van Gogh are stuck in the middle, ahead of Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Turner: a curiosity. Did the typesetter get confused? I don't know if that was remedied in a later edition.

I remembered almost all of the 100 plates in the way one recalls intensely the details of childhood while the important facts of the present quickly fade, but some pictures remained more firmly lodged than others in my memory.

Two that jump out at me are as follows:

The De Hooch below is called "Interior of A Dutch House." I offer a detail that shows what Kent notes--that you see the tile floor through the serving woman's skirt. Kent attributes this to the servant painted in as "a hurried afterthought." I first thought it might be evidence of a forgery, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The fuller picture is below this, showing the height of the room and the clarity of the paint and the light.

This painting fascinated me as a child because I had never quite seen a room like this--and it seemed oddly empty to me. I was also fascinated that the floor was very much like the asbestos tile floor in our basement (though there the darker tiles were a deep green).  Kent praises the simplicity of Dutch rooms, though this looks to me like a well-heeled interior. (As a child, I thought the people must be poor because of the lack of furniture.) One can vaguely see what look like bones--food refuse--thrown on the floor.

I had utterly forgotten the painting below, called "Between Two Fires" by American Francis Davis Millet, until I leafed through my newly-purchased tome. What would always startle me about this painting as a child, which I now know is a late nineteenth century evocation of a scene from the Puritan American colonies set in the same period as the de Hooch, was how oddly bright and white it was, unlike any other painting in the volume.

The curve at the top of this photo reflects the way the page curves down toward the binding while the shadow in the lower left is one I cast--it is not in the original. I placed an internet version below.

This internet version loses some of the startling white brightness of the painting. I learned reading Kent's introduction that Millet went down with the Titanic in 1912.

I will stop here, at a point where I am still looking at a painting through a child's eyes: the surface features, quality of light, squareness of line, empty space in a room, each encounter with these paintings a place of emotional intensity and new discovery, as if I both had and never had seen the picture before I looked again.

However,  a new encounter with the past changes everything, and a sense of purity gets lost as we dig beneath the surface. As Woolf says in Orlando--"Begone purity!" Or as the captain reminds Crusoe in Tournier's Friday, before the ships sinks:

“Crusoe,” he said sternly, take heed of what I say. Beware of purity. It is the acid of the soul.”

Bonhoeffer, too, deeply distrusted purity.

With that as a prelude, the child's purity and innocence of perception will be replaced by something perhaps deeper and richer in the next blog, as I briefly explore how two mainstream iconic examples of elite--or effete--Western art in World Famous Paintings have been redeployed for purposes undreamed of by their artists.