Lot Essay
In 1928, Rockwell Kent moved to Ausable Forks, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, where he would stay for the remainder of his life. He settled on Asgaard Farm, named after the ancient Norse word for “home of the gods.” Kent’s new home and the surrounding landscape became principal subjects for his subsequent body of work, which is “significant because it is an affirmative synthesis of his views on art and nature and life itself.” (C.M. Welsh, “Rockwell Kent: A Life and Art of His Own,” The View from Asgaard: Rockwell Kent’s Adirondack Legacy, exhibition catalogue, Blue Mountain Lake, New York, 1999, p. 2) The present work illustrates the themes of isolation and the sublime that Kent mastered through his grand depictions of nature in the Adirondacks.