ROCKWELL KENT | CAMPFIRE GIRL (NORTHERN EXPOSURE)

The artist

Hans Hinrichs (acquired from the above)

By descent to the present owner

We would like to thank Scott R. Ferris and Richard V. West for preparing the following comment:

Between 1929 and 1935, Rockwell Kent visited Greenland three times. During his second sojourn, 1931-32, he settled in the Inuit village of Igdlorssuit, where he became particularly interested in the various tasks performed by people in and around the village and the nomadic campsites used during the hunting season. This resulted in a number of on-the-spot drawings, watercolors, and oil studies. The present work, Campfire Girl (a.k.a. Northern Exposure) and its complement, Southern Exposure (lot 17), are two such studies. These paintings are closely related to the figures of working women in two paintings dating from 1932, Sunday Evening, Greenland (formerly of the Carl Van Vechten Gallery, Fisk University) and Campers, North Greenland (National Gallery of Armenia) (See Ferris, Scott R. and Ellen Pearce, Rockwell Kent’s Forgotten Landscapes, Down East Books. 1998, p. 84 and 37 respectively).  

The tongue-in-cheek titles that Kent applied to these paintings reference the intimate relationship the artist had with Hans Hinrichs: a relationship that began in the early 1940s. Shortly thereafter, Hinrichs’s employer, Rahr Malting Company, commissioned Kent to write and illustrate their centennial commemorative, To Thee! A Toast in Celebration of the Century of Opportunity and Accomplishment in America 1847-1947. Throughout their friendship Hinrichs came to amass a substantial collection Rockwell Kent paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints, of which these are two.