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Dimensions: 26 by 47 in.

(66 by 199.4 cm)

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Provenance: Private Collection, Staten Island, New York (acquired from the artist)
By descent to the present owner (his son)

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Exhibited: New York, Wildenstein Galleries; Los Angeles, California, Stendahl Art Galleries; Stockton, California, The Haggin Museum; Beloit, Wisconsin, Theodore Lyman Wright Art Hall, Beloit College; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Institute; Boston, Massachusetts, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Hall, Know and Defend America: Forty Paintings of Our Country and of the Out-Posts of Our Hemisphere, 1942-43, no. 15 (as Ice, Snow and Rock)

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Notes: "This panoramic vista of primordial serenity is of an inlet above the Arctic Circle off northwestern Greenland in the waters of Baffin Bay, south of Thule. It is one of the most northerly of locations Kent visited during his three trips to Greenland, from 1929 to 1935. There Kent found much of painterly fascination: earth tones of the striated coastal rock, purples and blues that dapple the water, and iridescent emerald greens of the submersed portions of the faceted icebergs. Kent recalled, 'The disintegration of the sea ice releases the impounded icebergs which the relentless, seaward pressure of the glaciers had accumulated. Borne by the tide and wind they sail majestically on their voyage to the south, marvels of jewel-like beauty on the deep blue summer sea' (Rockwell Kent, It's Me O Lord, New York, 1955, p. 462).

"Rockwell Kent probably commenced work on this painting during an expedition by motorboat to the far north of Greenland during the late summer of 1932. The mercurial wind and often harsh weather he encountered in Greenland, particularly during the rapid seasonal shift from summer to winter, permitted painting only of basic information, such as the contours and colors of land, horizon, and sea. Kent completed most of his paintings from Greenland upon return to his Adirondack studio. Ice, Sea and Rock was completed in time for its 1942 exhibition at Wildenstein & Co.?the gallery's second retrospective of Kent's work as a painter" (Jake Milgram Wien, Curator of the forthcoming exhibition Rockwell Kent:The Mythic and The Modern, Portland Museum of Art, Maine, Summer 2005).