Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

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From Rockwell Kent’s masterful 1930 edition. Would be nice to point to a complete online set of these illustrations but there doesn’t seem to be one. The black and white pictures are from this Flickr set which has a couple more examples.

Update: A (near) complete set of illustrations!

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3 thoughts on “Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick”

  1. Rockwell Kent, what a wonderful artist. An environmentalist & mystic before it became fashionable. An internationalist at a time of world paranoia. Unfortunately, his reputation is in limbo since he was crucified as being a “communist.” In a brave and fool hardy act [during Senator Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror]he gave a hundreds of his works to the Soviet Peoples and in turn became a member of Society Academy of Art and received the Lenin Peace Prize.

  2. I’ve just been rereading China Mieville’s The Scar, and that second image reminds me so much of the description of the illustration of an anophelius raising an avanc:

    “She still did not take her gaze from the picture she held: a little man in a little ship on a sea of frozen waves that overlapped in perfect sequence like fish scales, and below them deeps rendered in crosshatched and tightly spiraled ink, and at the bottom, easily eclipsing the vessel above, a circle in a circle in a circle, vast no matter how vague the perspective, unthinkably big, with darkness at the center. Looking up, looking up at the fisherman hunting his prey.”

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