Rockwell Kent
American, 1882 - 1971
Kent designed the bookplate shown above, taken from the Charlotte Whitney Allen Library's copy of Venus & Adonis, which was donated to the Library by the family of Leo Hart.
Rockwell Kent's illustrations for Shakespeare's
Venus & Adonis
This classical Greek poem retold by William Shakespeare in 1593 follows Venus's pursuit of the young hunter, Adonis. The goddess of love wooed Adonis unrelentingly, yet Adonis remained disinterested, preferring to hunt instead. As he sought his greatest challenge--the wild boar--fate intervened and the young hunter was slain.
After hearing Adonis's hounds, Venus rushed to find the youth and discovered his body. To ease her suffering, Venus transformed his blood into the flower we know as the anemone. Although the story's ending is tragic, it contains humorous elements and is charged with erotic imagery.
For the Hart publication, Kent selected 21 elements from the story to illustrate with pen and ink. The drawings were photographed on sensitized copper plates and bathed in acid, which etched the delicate lines into the plate. Engravers then worked on the plates by hand in order to ensure that the intricate details would reproduce clearly and crisply. Then, the plates were printed on paper with black and brown ink. Over a three month period, Leo Hart examined every sheet of paper as it came off the press to determine that the printing quality was consistent.
The text itself contains nearly 1200 lines of verse, separated into six-line stanzas comprised of a quatrain and a couplet. This poetic form, with its rhyme scheme 'ababcc,' is called the Venus & Adonis stanza after its first use in Shakespeare's poem.