'THAT DAY will mark a precedent," the
New Yorkermagazine once quipped, "which brings no news of Rockwell Kent".
No doubt it was an exaggeration even then when, clearly, he was much in the headlines. But the precedent mockingly yearned for was finally set, and has long since become the norm. Nobody hears much about Rockwell Kent any more.
There are various reasons for the American painter’s eclipse. One was his subject matter. Although his style has similarities with Edward Hopper, he specialised not in urban landscapes but in wildernesses, from Alaska to Patagonia, and especially Greenland where his best work was done. His fidelity to representational painting also made him unfashionable in the increasingly abstract art world of the 1920s onwards. And then there was his politics.
An ardent leftie, his brushes with authority eventually earned the attentions of Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade. A visit to Moscow – even with the high-minded purpose of pleading with the Soviet Union to renounce the atom bomb – was a particularly black mark on his file. And he had to fight a landmark legal case in the 1950s to be allowed travel to Europe again.
His intended destination on that occasion was not the USSR, however. It was Ireland, and Co Donegal in particular, which thus played a key role in his life for the second time. Back in 1926, Kent had spent an idyllic summer there, living in a converted one-room cowshed in the remote, almost empty valley of Glenlough.
The shed was the property of Glenlough’s only other inhabitants, Dan and Rose Ward, who owned the valley – all thousand acres of it. Having persuaded them to take a lodger, Kent used the same carpentry skills with which he had built a log cabin in Alaska to make the place habitable.
It was miles from the nearest village – Glencolmcille – and with no roads to speak of. But undaunted, Kent brought whatever supplies he needed on foot: lugging 50lb flour sacks on his back, secured Indian-style by a “tump-line” around his head.
Neighbours beyond Glenlough thought he was mad. Even so, they took him to their hearts, posing for paintings and giving him access to such sensitive local activities as poitín-making. Lending a twist to “still life”, Kent once even sketched the whiskey men, who fretted lest the Donegal gardaí develop a new interest in art.
They needn’t have worried. Such was the indifference (or suspicion) towards Kent’s output, even in his homeland, that he could not interest a US museum in housing it. He finally donated much of the collection – Donegal paintings included – to the USSR.
After Kent left Glenlough, the now (locally) famous cowshed played another cameo role in cultural history. Concerned about the drinking that would eventually kill him, friends of Dylan Thomas persuaded the poet to take a year-long retreat there in 1935. The experiment’s success was mixed, as were Thomas’s feelings about west Donegal. Demented by the area’s inversely proportional supplies of rain and sexually-available women, he left without paying the bill.
Nor was he the shed’s only other notable occupant, according to tradition. Long before either Kent or Thomas, Bonny Prince Charlie holed up in the same byre for “twelve months and a day” until a French ship took him away. Or so the local story goes.
Rockwell Kent’s eventual return to Co Donegal was precipitated by the news that the Wards – by then getting too old to cope with Glenlough’s isolation – were selling up. The asking price was a mere £200. And after doing the calculations, the painter leapt at the chance to buy a valley whose memory was still dear.
Unfortunately this is where the US state department intervened. By the time he won his epic case for a passport, the property was long sold. Nevertheless, Kent and his wife crossed the Atlantic in 1958, if only to renew old friendships.
They took the train from Belfast to Strabane, before boarding “the quaint little narrow-gauge wooden seated diesel affair that, rocking and bouncing, took us on and into Donegal”, and completing the journey to Glencolmcille by bus. There Kent met the Wards and accompanied the ageing Dan on what was – for both men – a last trek to Glenlough.
He met all his old acquaintances, including Annie McGinley, who in one of his best pictures he had portrayed as a young woman looking out to sea. Everywhere he was treated, as he later wrote, “with hospitality as generous and warm as, it would seem, only the very poor can afford”. It was a rose-tinted view, perhaps. But in the same memoir, he summed up the romantic philosophy that informed both his world view and his art. Quoting another man’s line about a vast prairie – “nothing was there but grass and the presence of God” – he saw Co Donegal as comprising “endless riven moors of grass and heather-grown turf and, if you like, God’s presence – or more moving, Man’s”.
He continued: “There are the moors; and equal in their dignity, the people. And nothing, one might say of them, is there but innate goodness, kindness, charity and utterly unconscious pride; a pride that recognises no man to be better than themselves; a pride that is without envy; and being without envy, is content. And through contentment, happy.”