Calm (Tierra del Fuego)

Artist
Location
Tierra del Fuego Province, Argentina
Date
1922-1925
Materials
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
86.36 x 111.79 cm
Credit
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, gift of Ellin and Ron Delsener
Locate on map View in timeline About the artist

A twentieth-century artist-traveler, Rockwell Kent explored key topographical sites in South America. Inspired by a similar wanderlust, Kent’s paintings are vastly different from the work of peripatetic nineteenth-century painters such as Frederic Edwin Church and Johann Mortiz Rugendas. In Calm (Tierra del Fuego), Kent conveys the spiritual power of the jagged, snow-capped mountains of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago off the coast of Chile, capturing their symmetric, watery reflections in a distinctly personal and modernist style. In depicting a region of the world untouched by societal transformations, Kent evokes the evolution of modern painting instead.