Sundown

Rockwell Kent's idealized landscape Sundown was once thought to have been painted during the artist's extended stay in Greenland in the early 1920s, but recent research determined that it was in fact painted in Vermont. However, the precise location is not as significant as its formal purity and abstract simplicity. (He called another treatment of the same view Nirvana and often exhibited the two paintings together.) Like the works of his contemporary Georgia O'Keeffe, Kent's compositions are typically uncluttered, spare, and monumental, with a brilliant light that casts deep, crisp shadows. Kent's strong sense of design made him a successful book illustrator and graphic artist as well, and for some years, his best-known images were the striking drawings he made for a 1930 edition of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Kent was also an outdoorsman, travel writer, and union organizer. His political radicalism caused his career to suffer in the 1950s and 1960s; his art disappeared from most galleries and magazines when he was attacked by anti-Communists in Congress. In the 1970s, interest in his painting was revived, and his landscapes of Vermont and Greenland are now among his most admired works

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