Blackhead, Monhegan Island, Maine

Provenance

Barridoff Galleries, South Portland, Maine, 1985

Private Collection, Montana

Sale, Coeur d’Alene Art Auction, Reno, Nevada, July 26, 2025, lot 295

Related Works

Brewing Storm, Monhegan, 1950, oil on canvas, 34 x 44 inches; Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

Blackhead, Monhegan, c. 1909. oil on canvas, 34 x 44 inches; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine

Whitehead, Monhegan, ca.1950, oil on panel, 12 x 16 inches, signed lower left: Rockwell Kent; Monhegan Museum of Art and History, Monhegan, Maine

Note

At the suggestion of his teacher Robert Henri, Kent traveled to Monhegan Island, where he encountered what he described as a “primordial universe”—an ancient, unyielding landscape far removed from the centers of civilization. This elemental setting ignited his mythopoeic imagination, a vision he would carry forward in his depictions of other remote and forbidding locales, including Newfoundland and Alaska. Inspired by Kent’s example, Edward Hopper and George Bellows later followed him to Monhegan, with Bellows reportedly “envious” of Kent’s achievement.[1]

[1] Jake Milgram Wien, Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Portland Museum of Art, 2005), 1-2.