Chapter 9

Rockwell Kent’s Canterbury Pilgrims

Jake Milgram Wien

The publication of the lavishly produced Canterbury Tales in 1930 heralded the wedding of Geoffrey Chaucer and Rockwell Kent. It was one of many unions that took place during the craze for expensive, limited editions that were conceived in America in the years leading up to the stock market crash of 1929. Bookstores oversubscribed all 999 sets of the two folios comprising the 1930 Covici-Friede edition of Canterbury Tales well before they went to press.¹ These sets, which featured a new verse translation by William Van Wyck as well as twenty-five full-page pen, brush, and ink drawings of medieval pilgrims by Kent,² made their way into well-appointed public and private libraries. They were followed in the next several years by tens of thousands of copies of the one-volume trade edition-with the J.U. Nicolson translation of 1934. These trade editions and subsequent reprintings, all of which reproduced Kent’s pilgrims (as well as his head and tail pieces), may have provided more readers with a visual introduction to Chaucer than any other printed interpretations before or since.

Kent’s drawings for Canterbury Tales updated Chaucer for an ever-widening twentieth century audience. As he did with Casanova, Voltaire, Melville, and later with Whitman, Shakespeare, Goethe, Boccaccio, and other world-class writers, Kent produced illustrations that persuasively melded his intelligence and artistry with the spirit of the text at hand. Kent’s reputation among distinguished book publishers became legendary for his ability to depict dramatically unfolding events involving multiple characters and dynamic compositions. Stanley Morison, the influential English type designer, book artist, and historian of printing and typography, considered the publishing debut of Random House, the 1928 Candide, filled with Kent’s sprightly pen, brush, and ink drawings, to be "the most important illustrated book to have been made in America."³ Among the finest, and most critically acclaimed of Kent’s accomplishments in the book arts were his pen, brush and ink drawings for the monumental three-volume Lakeside Press edition of Moby Dick or the Whale, also published in 1930. They reflected Kent’s ongoing commitment to research extensively the particulars of his literary classic; in the case of Moby Dick or the Whale, the challenge included nineteenth century rigging and whaling. Kent’s twenty-five Canterbury pilgrims, however, are portraits of individuals-something that prompted one graphic art historian to comment that they are, in a strictly technical sense, "barely illustrative."⁴ Though Kent did complete his pilgrims with relative dispatch and constancy in conception, he nevertheless sustained them in ways that subtly inform the reader and rise to the lofty spirit of the text.

Sublime, indeed, is how those responsible for updating Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales deemed Kent’s visual interpretations. Upon seeing the first ten of Kent’s twenty-five portraits, Pascal Covici considered them "magnificent."⁵ Unmitigated praise also came from the book’s translator, William Van Wyck, who received the volumes immediately upon publication. Van Wyck, a wealthy prodigy living in elegance in Paris at the time,⁶ congratulated Kent for his illustrations, describing them as "big, vital things" that capture "every possible nuance of the spirit of Chaucer. The sculptural quality literally takes my breath away," he wrote. Van Wyck also approved of Kent’s "very intelligent head and tailpieces which also breath [sic] the spirit of the tales," Van Wyck’s favorite portraits were the Miller (figure 1), the Friar (figure 2), the Shipman (i.e., the Sailor), and the Wife of Bath (figure 3). Originally concerned about the selection of Kent as illustrator, Van Wyck was all the more thrilled upon seeing the resulting set of folios. Fearing he might not interpret the Chaucer spirit, Van Wyck proclaimed, "Good God! Interpret the Chaucer spirit! Man alive, old Geoffrey couldn’t have interpreted the Chaucer spirit any better than you have done. Were he alive, he would be hugging himself over his luck in having you for his illustrator." He added in an emphatic postscript, "Your manner of doing hands and feet is too marvellous for words."⁷

What excited Kent’s publishers, and particularly the translator, was the entirely modern sensibility with which Kent conjured up his pilgrims, substantially differing, for example, from their portrayal in the early nineteenth century tempera painting by William Blake (color plate 33), whom Kent admired. Blake’s pilgrims set forth on horses, whereas Kent’s pilgrims are stationary and without their mounts. As one who was sympathetic to the workingman and the underprivileged throughout his life, Kent provided a new approach to visualizing the social hierarchy of Chaucer’s times. By situating the pilgrims on the earth (or on tree stumps or rocks), Kent accentuated their shared humanity and leveled the playing field by blurring class distinctions. The absence of animals from Kent’s portraits also provided for decorative unity, and most certainly, for simplicity of his effort both in research and design. The featureless backgrounds—skies constructed solely with horizontal lines—provided commentary beyond their faux-Italian Renaissance woodcut design that recalled Titian’s St Roch, for example. Kent occasionally illuminated his pen, brush, and ink illustrations with lines emanating diagonally from above, thereby creating a sense of awe and religiosity, if not divinity. He notably refrained from so anointing his Canterbury pilgrims, rendering them less pious, in alignment with the Chaucerian spirit.

In yet another way, Kent broke with conventional portrayals of Chaucer’s pilgrims. In a very real sense, Kent rendered the pilgrims as Chaucer conceived them—bearers of fascinating stories and individuals capable of inhabiting various roles. In Kent’s imagined world they became dramatis personae—actors on the stage of life, rendered as though taking commands from a director or posing for camera. As an amateur photographer in Greenland who stood behind a hand-held moving camera in the months leading up to completing Canterbury Tales, Kent had long cultivated an appreciation of the stage and screen. His creative life was enriched by the theatrical impulse, particularly during the 1930s when he tried to make a role for himself in Hollywood. Though he did not succeed in making the Hollywood movie of his dreams (which he hoped to film during his second winter sojourn in Greenland), he did invest his drawings, watercolors, and paintings from those years with theatricality and even a cinematic vision.⁸ Kent’s twenty-five pilgrims prefigure the full-length portraits of Greenlanders he drew between 1932 and 1935, portraits that approximate character studies for a prospective movie.⁹

Also particularly modern was the way Kent’s pilgrims appeared on the printed page—strangely looking as though pulled from a Renaissance woodblock. Kent hoped to "enrich the appearance" of his pilgrims with the addition of a color (he originally suggested gray), and Covici immediately approved, wanting to implement Kent’s designs and ideas "to the letter."¹⁰ The effect of the resulting coloration—black, brown, and white of the paper—not only enhanced the dimensionality, character, and design of the pilgrims, it strongly suggested a link to the age of Chaucer (or shortly thereafter) through the evocation of the chiaroscuro woodcut. The playful spirit with which Kent drew and colored his pilgrims was in keeping with the way he often cast his twentieth century vision in a classical mold.¹¹ Kent also subjected his signature technique—a consuming linearity established through precise, successive strokes and ornamental restraint—to the incongruities of geometric abstraction. Myriad highly irregular geometries in brown and black emerge primarily within the borders of the costumes, and additional abstract highlights are provided by the white of the paper. The resulting confluence of techniques—art deco and geometric abstraction with Renaissance classical—generated visual intrigue in the same knowing, charming way that Chaucer enlightened through the inner ironies of his tales.

Modern as well as unabashed were Kent’s overt references to theories of behavior propounded by Freud. Kent, an incorrigible playboy of the Western world, found Freudian analysis amusing, if less than compelling. More than occasionally Kent brought Freud to task with his suggestive compositions in pen, brush, and ink,¹² and he found ample room for play with his Canterbury pilgrims. Witness the presence, size and generally vertical placement of such medieval weapons as the lance which Sir Thopas clutches with both hands; the sword and scabbard of the Knight; and the swords of Melibeus, the Reeve, the Miller, the Monk (figure 4), and the Yeoman. Kent subjected the masculinity and virtue of these pilgrims to his good-natured assault—an obvious artistic ploy but perhaps excusable in light of the dead-end he claimed to have reached when investigating medieval costume. He recalled quitting his research for Canterbury Tales after the chief librarian of Copenhagen informed him "of all periods within the Christian era the Fourteenth Century in England is possibly the most lacking in pictorial representation."¹³ Kent surmised, "in [the] last analysis, Chaucer’s own words are the best extant authority for what was worn in Chaucer’s day."¹⁴ Consequently, he relied on his undergraduate training as an architect at Columbia University, which had prepared him to reconstruct buildings graphically from written descriptions. Confident that he did the best job he could do with the limited visual resources at hand, Kent mused, “[A]s to credit for the merits or defects of the Chaucerian costumes as I have shown them, it may always be a toss-up between Geoffrey Chaucer and R. Kent.”¹⁵

In many instances, Kent set aside Chaucer’s explicit details of costume and personal effects for details of his own imagining. For example, he omitted the sharp spurs on the Wife of Bath’s feet (perhaps because she was no longer atop her nag) as well as the soft boots of the Monk (he wore sandals instead). Kent also omitted the lap box of the Pardoner (perhaps because he was not sitting) and placed a scroll in his right hand.

This exercise of artistic license demonstrated Kent’s proclivity to supplant, and at times to disregard, the Chaucerian text. When supplying marks of physical distinction, Kent frequently followed Chaucer’s lead. The Miller’s marvelous nose wart with its tuft of hairs, the forked beard of the Merchant and the tangled beard of the Sailor, the bandaged open sore on the shin of the Cook, and the flamboyant shoulder-length curls of the Pardoner were all persuasively handled by Kent. But Kent chose not to display the famous gap between the teeth of the Wife of Bath, opting for other descriptive measures to convey the same sexual innuendo—a round face and accentuated wide hips. The Monk in facial profile shows off his extraordinary proboscis, not alluded to by Chaucer, who instead mentioned his bulging eyes and corpulence. And as already noted, Kent altered Chaucer’s vision by dismounting the pilgrims.

Kent’s mastery at satiric portraiture is most evident in his deft handling of character nuances such as posture, gesture, and facial expression. The Lawyer, for example, has his back turned to the reader, thereby rendering inscrutable his countenance. Kent mocked effeminacy in the Pardoner by rendering limp the wrist that holds his cross set with stones, as he skewered delicacy in the Nun’s Priest by presenting him with hands plaintively crossed over his heart, with feet that are slightly pigeon-toed, and one knee bent. The Manciple is drawn with fists clenched, and scowling face to reflect his consuming passion for fiscal gain. Bodily strength and fortitude are suggested in the stances of the Plowman (figure 5) and the Sailor, both of whom eye the reader with the directness indicative of rectitude.

Among Kent’s characteristic flourishes is the fluttering bird apparently fascinated with the Wife of Bath, the bird positioned curiously in sight of her ample bosom revealed through an open blouse. A careful reader will notice the tiny face of bearded Jesus (a vernicle or veronica) sewn on the cap of the Pardoner—a most unlikely pilgrim to bear such an artifact. Kent made sure to include it in his portrait, and it hints at the artist’s iconoclasm with respect to the Church and its mystical doctrine. Other personal touches are found in characters with which Kent probably identified, including the Cook (figure 6) and the Friar. Bald, rather short, and sexually precocious as a mature adult, Kent, who occasionally engaged his pen, brush, and ink in deprecating self-portraiture, probably saw elements of his past in the Cook whom he rendered essentially hairless, bug-eyed, and spent. Musically inclined and with a daughter who played the violin, Kent may also have identified with the Friar, affectionately partnered with his fiddle, and distinctively sporting a tonsered crown. Gracing the dust jacket of many trade editions is the Friar, who lends a musicality to the entire text.

Subjecting Chaucer’s pilgrims to the inventive artistry of Rockwell Kent demonstrated Covici-Friede’s conviction that the writer and artist might be cut from a similar cloth. Though judgmental, dogmatic, and frequently unforgiving in life, Kent the writer was, like Chaucer, an assiduous student of humanity and an accomplished observer. Indeed, each was unsentimentally in love with the world and its inhabitants, and concerned about improving the social order. Kent (through his drawings rather than his paintings) and Chaucer alike took great delight in the practical joke and exhibited a proclivity toward irony in their artistry and genius for sympathetically conveying the pretenses and foibles of their fellow man. More importantly, each mirrored a world in disorder—Chaucer, the declining and uncertain world of Christianity, and Kent, the transitional society of modernizing post-WWI America. By the time he confronted Chaucer’s pilgrims head on, Kent was nearly fifty years old, a world traveler himself who had long abandoned the religiosity of his early youth for a secular humanism that would mold his life’s work.

Pascal Covici and Donald Friede recognized in Kent a kindred spirit who held the beauty of the printed book in high regard. Kent was a committed bibliophile who was deeply influenced by the visionary writings and drawings of William Blake, and a proponent of the achievements of William Morris and his Kelmscott Press. Following their aesthetic lead, Kent took part in the design and layout of the books he wrote and illustrated as well as of the commissions that came to him, advising even on the choice of paper and typeface that would best complement his artistry. Kent worked with Covici and Friede both in the design and the layout of Canterbury Tales, helping Covici realize his publishing ambition to make their illustrated edition of Chaucer’s classic "the most beautiful book" Covici-Friede had ever done.¹⁶

Covici and Friede probably appreciated Kent for yet another of his many talents–his piquant drawings in ink that raised many an eyebrow in 1920s. For more than a decade (1916-1926), Kent pursued a parallel career as the pen-and-ink humorist "Hogarth, Jr.," creating astonishingly fluid and decisively modern-spirited drawings that landed on the desks of Manhattan’s finest editors including Vanity Fair’s dapper Frank Crowninshield. As early as 1916, Crowninshield published Kent’s light-hearted, irreverent drawings, pairing them with the raucous verse of Dorothy Parker and the urbane satire of George S. Chappell. Harper’s Weekly, Puck, Life, and the Sunday New York Tribune gave Kent additional exposure both during and after World War I. Like his contemporary Miguel Covarrubias, Kent undertook assignments requiring the drawings of types of individuals. In May and June of 1922, for example, Vanity Fair published two series of caricatures by Kent celebrating bohemian painters and poets–eccentric types native to Greenwich Village and the Bronx. In March of the same year, the Sunday New York Tribune published six small drawings by Kent (figure 7) that accompanied a humorous article about the sorry preeminence of the wife’s family (one in a series of humorous articles Kent illustrated, under the heading "A Handbook for Husbands").¹⁷ On ten of its covers in 1927, the semimonthly pulp magazine Adventure featured Kent’s brush drawings in ink and tempera of stalwart individual outdoorsmen, including a pirate, gunslinger, big game hunter, Crusader, cowboy, explorer, and Native American on the warpath. These drawings demonstrated Kent’s extraordinary facility at rendering character types, a natural ability that would ultimately chart him on a course toward the twenty-five "types" he encountered in Canterbury Tales.

Friede first proposed that Kent prepare one full-page illustration for each tale, as well as separate drawings as frontispieces for each of the two volumes with each drawing depicting all the pilgrims whose tales appear in that volume.¹⁸ This conceptual framework gave way, in the next several months, to the contract entered into, which provided for twenty-five full-page drawings of the pilgrims, with the deluxe editions (defined below) accorded five separate panels depicting them in groups of five. Kent was required to submit a maximum of ninety-six head and tail piece drawings for the various tales and prologues by October 1, 1929. In February 1929, the deadline was moved forward to June 1, a few weeks before Kent would set sail for Greenland. This accelerated schedule proved unrealistic, primarily because of Kent’s outstanding obligations to complete his drawings for Moby Dick or the Whale and the time-consuming preparations required for the month he would spend in a boat without motor or radio.

The publisher’s anxiety about project completion heightened when news of Kent’s harrowing mid-July shipwreck appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Though Covici and Friede were relieved to find Kent had survived, they were nervous about being able to fill in a timely manner the orders already outstanding. By December, Kent had returned to his upstate New York farm via Copenhagen, with partially completed canvases in hand—sea and landscapes of Greenland painted with brushes he salvaged from the shipwreck. Once back in his studio, he focused on his commission to illustrate Chaucer, submitting ten full-length portraits in early February 1930, and the remaining fifteen by early March. Kent executed these drawings with pen, brush, and black ink over graphite (image size 11^1/8 x 6^7/8 inches) on paper laid down on Whatman artist’s board (15 x 11 inches). Same size proofs of the drawings were printed by Offset Printing Plate Company of New York, and in early April Kent completed hand coloring the proofs in brown (or bistre) and submitted the head and tailpieces.¹⁹

Both Kent and Covici recognized the appeal of color in the modern world of publishing. An attractive flourish on an otherwise staid printed page, color had just gained Kent critical recognition, after he (with studio assistants) applied a rainbow of watercolors to the dozens of his pen, brush, and ink drawings reproduced in the first 95 of 1470 copies comprising the 1928 limited edition of Candide. Carl Van Doren regarded these hand-colored volumes of Candide as the most beautiful of any edition of the book since its appearance in 1759. In the hand-colored Candide, Kent perhaps came closest in his career to approximating the overall beauty of William Blake’s hand-colored engraved texts and illustrations. Kent’s well-stocked library contained much by Blake, including a nineteenth-century facsimile edition of the marvelously hand-colored The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Just as Blake may have inspired Kent to hand color Candide, so as artist like Lucas Cranach or Ugo da Carpi may have inspired Kent to color his Canterbury pilgrims. The chiaroscuro woodcut of the Renaissance—with its classical coloration of black, brown, and white of the paper—may have served as Kent’s visual template.

After coloring the printer’s proofs, Kent fulfilled his obligations to Covici-Friede at the end of the summer when he added his signature to the five horizontal panels reproducing five pilgrims each, and to the "limit" page at the back of the second volume in each of the 999 sets of folios. Those copies numbered 1–75 (the "deluxe edition") were printed on Crane’s Olde Book paper, bound in pigskin, and housed in a box which contained a cloth slipcase for the five signed panels. Those copies numbered 76–999 were printed on Worthy Number Two Rag paper and bound in gilt titled linen covered boards. All pages in the limited edition measured 15 x 10 inches and had top edges gilt. Unlike the successor trade editions, which contained only the modern translation, the limited edition presented both the Chaucerian text and its new verse translation in parallel columns.

Each of the five panels contained in the deluxe edition slipcase measured approximately 15^3/8 x 39^3/4 inches. The images were the same as in the two folios, with additional touches seamlessly weaving the ground foliage together—facilitated by the uniformly low horizon lines throughout the twenty-five portraits—to create the illusion that the five pilgrims stand (or site, as the case may be) next to one another. Kent cleverly placed at panel left those pilgrims looking to their left, and at panel right those pilgrims looking to their right, with the exception of the Lawyer, whose back is turned. The central figures—the Plowman, the Second Nun, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and the Yeoman—generally direct their attention at the reader. The inclusion of these signed panels in the deluxe edition accounted in large part for the price differential between it and the ordinary limited edition ($250 to $50). This original valuation differential of 5:1 has escalated to about 20:1 in 2003.

The 1930 limited edition sets printed each of Kent’s twenty-five Canterbury pilgrims on a full page, without text or title, with the reverse side blank. The drawings were reproduced by way of an innovative, highly accurate process conceived by Hugo Knudsen, general manager of Offset Printing Plate Company of New York. The Knudsen process involved, very generally, the creation of lithographic plates for printing that are produced photographically and without ruled screens.²⁰ Each pilgrim is situated directly opposite the beginning page of his or her tale, except for the plowman, who tells no tale and becomes the frontispiece. In order of appearance, those pilgrims in Volume I are: the Plowman, the Knight, the Miller, the Reeve, the Cook, the Lawyer, the Sailor, the Prioress, Sir Thopas, Melibeus, the Monk, the Nun’s Priest, and the Physician. Those pilgrims in Volume II are: the Pardoner, the Wife of Bath, the Friar, the Summoner, the Clerk, the Merchant, the Squire, the Franklin, the Second Nun, the Canon’s Yeoman, the Manciple, and the Parson.

In 1934, Kent’s Canterbury pilgrims proliferated in trade editions published by Covici-Friede and Doubleday & Co., each situating the full-page illustrations in the body of the tales themselves, mostly on facing pages with the reverse side blank. The Covici-Friede trade edition reproduced in blue a newly minted drawing by Kent of a jester’s hat, with Sir Thopas as the fontispiece. The successor Doubleday trade edition reproduced the pilgrims in the same order, with the following exception: the drawing of Melibeus was renamed "Chaucer" and used not in sequence as specified above, but as the frontispiece. The Doubleday edition rectified ambiguities created by the Covici-Friede trade edition by titling each portrait with the identity of the pilgrim, and at the bottom of the page inserting a quotation from the text describing the pilgrim. Beneath the drawing of Chaucer, for example, was the title "Chaucer" and beneath that the quotation, "I will relate a little thing in prose/That ought to please you, or so I suppose…." Illustrations in the trade editions were reduced in size by about forty percent, from 9^3/4 inches to, generally, 5^1/2 inches. Compromising severely the beauty and detail of Kent’s original portraits, the illustrations reproduced to such small scale in the trade editions have not served Kent well, though they have increased the accessibility of Chaucer in the twentieth century. Only the privileged few have seen Kent’s Canterbury pilgrims in the fullness of their original incarnation as published in the lavish two-folio sets.

Notes

I am grateful to the following individuals who assisted in the realization of this essay: John G. Deedy, Jr., Jerry Kelly, Robert Rightmire, Will Ross, Eliot H. Stanley, and Richard V. West.

¹ Letter from Donald S. Friede to Rockwell Kent (in Copenhagen), dated September 4, 1929. Archives of American Art, Rockwell Kent Papers, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C, microfilm roll 5172, frame 782 (hereinafter referred to as the "Rockwell Kent Papers").

² Kent’s studio drawings in India ink were frequently executed with a finely tipped brush. He probably used a combination of pen and ink with brush and ink to render his drawings for Canterbury Tales.

³ Letter from Elmer Adler (in London) to Donald Klopfer, dated May 20, 1928, cited in Kenneth A. Lohf, "The Candide Collaboration: A Pair of Gifts", Columbia Library Columns, February 1976.

⁴ Fridolf Johnson, The Illustrations of Rockwell Kent (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.,1976), p. xii. Johnson failed to mention that the scope of Kent’s assignment for Covici-Friede was the limited presentation of the pilgrims, and not the more laborious and time-consuming portrayal of characters and events presented in the pilgrims’ tales.

⁵ Pascal Covici to Rockwell Kent, letter dated February 6, 1930. Rockwell Kent papers, microfilm roll 5172, frame 789.

⁶ Ward Ritchie, "When Life was the Future: a Memoir", Coranto, Number 24 (1988), pp. 39-41.

⁷ William Van Wyck to Rockwell Kent, letter dated September 25, 1930. Rockwell Kent Papers, microfilm roll 5172, frame 814.

⁸ This thesis is first presented in my article "Rockwell Kent and Hollywood", Archives of American Art Journal, Volume 42, nos. 3–4, 2002, forthcoming.

⁹ Kent’s Greenlanders were painted with watercolor, drawn on lithographic stone, or drawn directly on paper with conté crayon. The conté drawings were published in Salamina, Kent’s 1935 Greenland book.

¹⁰ Rockwell Kent to Pascal Covici, letter dated January 2, 1929 [1930]. Rockwell Kent Papers, microfilm roll 5172, frame 767. Pascal Covici to Rockwell Kent, letter dated January 8, 1930. Rockwell Kent Papers, microfilm roll 5172, frame 786.

¹¹ As an experienced printmaker, Kent had addressed related visual issues with equal aplomb. For example, his chiaroscuro zinc engraving, Wayside Madonna, imitated the classically colored woodcut print, though its content was highly irreverent and contrary to classical notions of piety. Created in 1927 for the holiday cards of Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield, Kent’s engraving portrayed the Virgin Mary playfully balancing the baby Jesus on her shoulders. By adding the colors brown and grayish-green to his composition, Kent highlighted the area where the full-length skirt meets the right thigh to create the illusion that the Virgin’s skirt were dramatically slit.

¹² Little has been written about the influence of Freud on Kent. As early as 1919, Kent’s second print, Blue Bird, a woodengraving, reflected the artist’s perverse interest in Freudian theory.

¹³ Rockwell Kent, It’s Me O Lord (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1955), p. 443. Kent began his research into Chaucer while a guest of Knud Rasmussen, the Danish Arctic explorer and enthnographer, whom Kent met on the steamer sailing from Greenland. It was Rasmussen who introduced Kent to the chief librarian of Copenhagen.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Pascal Covici to Rockwell Kent, letter dated January 8, 1930. Rockwell Kent Papers, microfilm roll 5172, frame 786.

¹⁷ The types reproduced in figure 7 are the wife, the grouchy rich uncle, gloomy distinguished brother, boring but brilliant nephew, dissolute cousin, and spoiled child. These drawings were published in the New York Tribune, March 5, 1922. Collection of Richard V. West.

¹⁸ Donald S. Friede to Rockwell Kent, letter dated August 22, 1928. Rockwell Kent Papers, mircofilm roll 5172, frame 758.

¹⁹ Four of the twenty-five drawings surfaced in the marketplace in February 2003. The four—ex-collection Dexter G. Cook, signed by Kent lower right and titled lower left in ink—were of identical size. Presumably, all twenty-five of Kent’s Canterbury pilgrims conformed to this 11^1/8 x 6^7/8-inch format.

²⁰ See, for example, A.C. Austin, "An Outline of the Knudsen Process", in The Penrose Annual: Review of the Graphic Arts (R.B. Fishenden Ed., London, Lund and Humphries & Co. Ltd.), Vol. 40, 1938, pp. 121–123.