A Low-lying Landscape

Like Guy Pène du Bois, Rockwell Kent studied with leading American art teachers William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri in New York, but his itinerary after that led him to many remote locales, including the extreme latitudes of Greenland and Tierra del Fuego (located off the southernmost tip of South America). Perhaps even more than for his paintings, Kent is famous for the prints and book illustrations he made to accompany autobiographical accounts of his travels. In 1926, Kent married his second wife, Frances Lee, and sold several paintings to wealthy collector Duncan Phillips in order to help fund four months’ summer stay in Ireland. The couple managed to rent a cottage deep in the isolated valley of Glenlough in County Donegal. Despite the humble quarters (the cottage had been used as a cow shed), Kent remembered the time in Ireland as among the happiest of his life. A Low-Lying Landscape depicts the scenery around Ardara, a market town near Glenlough.