20–6728
Rockwell Kent is an artist who spent one autumn and winter on an island in Resurrection bay, Kenai peninsula, Alaska, in company with his nine year old son. Since his return he has exhibited the paintings that are the fruit of those months. This book, published with an introduction by Dorothy Canfield and illustrations from the author’s drawings, is a record of “quiet adventure,” telling of the daily life of the two, father and son, with their one companion Olson,—a perfect companion for great solitudes. Of what the experience meant to both man and boy, the artist writes, “It seems that we have both together by chance turned out of the beaten, crowded way and come to stand face to face with that infinite and unfathomable thing which is the wilderness; and here we have found ourselves—for the wilderness is nothing else. It is a kind of living mirror that gives back as its own all and only all that the imagination of a man brings to it. It is that which we believe it to be.”
“Mr Kent’s journal makes pleasant and easy reading; but it is obvious enough that the letterpress in this rich volume is little more than an excuse for the drawings. It is as a pictorial artist that Mr Kent asks for criticism and admiration, not as a writer. If Blake had never lived, the art of Rockwell Kent would not have been what it is. All of Blake that can be made into a convention he has conventionalized. But when we look for the force that can turn a convention into living art, we look almost in vain.” A. L. H.
+ − Ath p172 Ag 6 ’20 650w + Booklist 16:309 Je ’20
Reviewed by H: McBride
Dial 69:91 Jl ’20 800w
“The result of their year at Fox Island is the startlingly beautiful series of drawings reproduced in the text and the ‘Journal of quiet adventure’ itself, an important event for many reasons but perhaps chiefly for its unparalleled record of a year of perfect happiness and freedom in the life of a child.” Martha Gruening
+ Freeman 1:165 Ap 28 ’20 550w
“To what can we compare this very beautiful and poignant record of one of the most unusual adventures ever chronicled? It is not like ‘Walden,’ it is not like any other diary of experiences in the wilderness.” M. F. Egan