Rockwell Kent and Asgaard

Artist Rockwell Kent was an inveterate wanderer, spending time in Maine, Alaska, Labrador, Greenland and Tierra del Fuego, among other remote spots. But when he settled down, it was on a farm in the Adirondacks which he named Asgaard, located in Au Sable Forks, New York. I visited this month, for the farm is still prospering in a wonderfully modest way (Kent was never the agribusiness type), specializing in goat cheese and—to the present owners' surprise, given the unexpected demand—salted caramels.
   Kent is a favorite artist in our family, partly for his love of the wilderness, partly because of his stylistically vibrant prints and drawings. He had a wonderful sense of book design, manifested in N by E and Salamina, two volumes about his experiences in Labrador and Greenland. The Modern Library edition of Moby Dick also uses Kent's superb drawings. My wife and daughter are both artists and my first book editor, Angus Cameron, was a friend of Kent and his wife. When I got to know Angus in the 1970s, he was still visiting Sally Kent at Asgaard.
    Off in a quiet grove near the open fields, stands the artist's studio which Kent designed for himself. These days, the farm offers internships to young artists who use the studio.  

Kent's name for his farm, Asgaard, refers in Norse mythology to one of the nine worlds of the gods. The thirteenth-century Icelander Snorri Sturleson described Asgaard as a land more fertile than any other, blessed by an abundance of gold and jewels. Kent had cows instead, but he loved the land and its views. "And there, westward and heavenward, to the high ridge of Whiteface northward to the northern limit of the mountains, southward to their highest peaks, was spread the full half-circle panorama of the Adirondacks. It was as if we had never seen the mountains before." He wrote of his time there in This Is My Own and appended that title to his gravestone, where he is buried, not far from his studio. The mosses and lichens are steadily encroaching, and perhaps Kent might have found pleasing the idea of becoming one with the nature he so loved. Then again, he was headstrong and proud enough that he probably wouldn't have protested if the gravestone were cleaned off and spiffed up a wee mite now and then!