Woman with Pearls (Head and Shoulders of a Woman)

Rockwell Kent was an independent person with a particularly private personality. Following only his inner voice, he traveled to exotic and extreme locales, where his art connected with the land, environments, and the people he was visiting. On his travels Kent took with him oil paint and pencils to record his experiences. The resultant images became sources for his art throughout his life.

Although Kent focused on painting during most of his career, his involvement in and mastery of printmaking began in the 1920s. He initially pursued printmaking for economic reasons and he received commission from a New York firm to produce advertising drawings, such as this one, in pen and ink. For these, Kent abstracted a graphic style from his paintings, using strong blacks and whites, clear shapes, and precise lines, as is evident in Woman with Pearls. Posed against a setting of mountains and water (a scene inspired by his travels) an idealized woman admires a strand of pearls. The drawing’s pulsating rhythms combine with the forms to draw the viewer’s eyes to the pearls, the objects of the woman’s attention and the subject of the advertising image.