Rockwell Kent, c.1970
(Photographic print: b&w; 13 x 18 cm. Courtesy of the Rockwell Kent papers,
ca.1840–1993, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)
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In his last years, Kent found
fewer and fewer reasons to leave Asgaard, his “most real and sacred
place.” But he did make several trips to the Soviet Union, the last in 1967
to receive the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening
Peace Among Peoples. Granted one last appearance on the
international stage, Kent, at age 85, condemned the United
States’ intervention in Vietnam, calling it “the most shameful
thing that has happened in our country’s history.”
Award ceremony, Lenin Peace Prize, Moscow, 1967
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On a March evening in 1971, three months before his 89th
birthday, Kent was sitting in his favorite chair by the fire. “I am very tired,”
he told Sally. He leaned forward, trying to pluck petals from the woven floralpatterned
rug at his feet, and then fell back.
Kent’s lengthy obituary appeared on the front page of the New York Times. It
catalogued his accomplishments but did not capture his true spirit. In an
earlier radio interview, Kent had provided the key in far fewer words:
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“I look back on my life as from a mountaintop that I had reached walking
through snow. And if I might think that I had covered all of that area
below me I’d see my little wandering trail coming across and all the rest is
unknown. I know very little. I’ve gotten all that I could get out of life. All
I want? No. I want it all. Don’t you?”
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Rockwell Kent is buried at his beloved Asgaard. His resting place is marked
by a block of Vermont granite that bears the title of his first autobiography,
This Is My Own, taken from “Native Land,” a poem by Walter Scott:
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Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er with him burn’d
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d
From wandering on a foreign strand!
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Biographical text by Frederick Lewis
Documentary Filmmaker,
Associate Professor at Ohio University
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This exhibition was curated by Cecilia M. Esposito
Director,
Plattsburgh State Art Museum
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 | Sally Kent, 1967
bronze
Gift of Sally Kent Gorton
[X1978.7.208] |
 | Rockwell Kent, 1967
bronze
Gift of Sally Kent Gorton
[X1978.7.207] |
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