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at distant mountain panoramas of the Aialik Peninsula from his beach cove, Kent found solace and exhilaration in the utter remoteness just outside his cabin door. Here was an asylum for the troubled human soul, a soul anxious to abandon the “confusing intricacy of modern societies.”3 If you felt that city life was an unendurable torment, then Alaska was a logical prescription. In truth, Kent, with his son Rocky at his side, never felt alone. On Fox Island, waters abounding with river otters, Dall porpoises, harbor seals (Phoca vitulina), and Steller’s sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus) surrounded them. Humpback whales cavorted in the bay outside their cabin door, and scores of ducks flew overhead. Sometimes orcas maneuvered into shore to rub their huge bellies on the pebble beach. When the air was mild, the seabirds turned silent, poking for crabs in the soft blue dusk. But Kent knew that Resurrection Bay was a shipwreck zone where “frightful currents and winds” would have daunted even the bravest New England fishermen.4 Every Alaskan town built a little memorial to honor the seafarers who never returned home with their catch.

From the air, Fox Island would look like a backward number 3. There were two coves on the west side, and on the eastern part of the dollop savage cliffs seemed as forbidding as Alcatraz. Occasionally a bear would swim out to Fox Island from the mainland, and then leave, disappointed, after a fruitless look around for food. Kent treated with reverence every bird nest and seal rock he found around Resurrection Bay. To keep his son company on Fox Island, Kent adopted a little porcupine (Erethizan dorsatum) as a family pet. The largely nocturnal herbivore ate twigs, leaves, and plants, nourishment for growing the quills needed for its self-defense system. When easels were set up outside the cabin, the little porcupine also developed a liking for licking wet paint. A typical painter might not find this humorous. But Kent, who had a truant disposition, was different. Surrounded by wilderness and ocean, he preferred stormy weather to a safe anchorage.

Kent found the kaleidoscopic radiance of wild Alaska, and even the inconveniences associated with frontier conditions, exhilarating. The color scheme of the Kenai Peninsula landscape was dramatically different from that of Maine or the Adirondacks. In 1918 the most famous painter who had tried to capture Alaskan landscapes on canvas was Albert Bierstadt; his Wreck of the Ancon, Loring Bay, done in 1889, became a symbol of man’s inability to defeat nature. It took Kent all of a minute to realize that Bierstadt’s so-called realist paintings falsified the true outdoor nuances of color, darkness, and shadows in the far north. Surrounded by the primordial landscape, Kent used a broad range of electric blues and bleached whites. The overcast aura of Fox Island also called for the gunmetal grays on his palette. Each place Kent went in Alaska that impressed him inspired its own refined painting. Yet the lifestyles of the hardened, blistering Seward fishermen, trappers, and prospectors, all physically battered by the inhospitable elements, caused Kent to also paint crudely, like a folk artist. “Alaska is a fairyland in the magic beauty of its mountains and water,” Kent wrote. “The Virgin freshness of this wilderness and its utter isolation are a constant source of inspiration. Remote and free from contact with man, our life is simplicity itself.”5

Finding Kent’s proper place in American art history has proved to be difficult. His paintings of Bear Glacier (today part of Kenai Fjords National Park), sketched from the south end of his beach on Fox Island, stand out as major works of American art. Only one other American painter has ever come close to capturing Alaska’s landscape with the illuminating and haunting halo effect that Kent created. In 1904 Sydney Mortimer Laurence arrived in Alaska from Brooklyn hoping to find gold. Unable to do that, Laurence, an amateur oil painter, decided to earn money by capturing the iridescent glow of Mount McKinley on canvas. Both Muir