Henry Rodman Kenyon (1861-1926) was an artist of rare modesty. While diligently pursuing his art throughout the entirety of his mature life, he did little to promote his work after his early career. As a result, the work of this prolific painter is not well known. This reclusive nature led him to be disdainful of large paintings, which, clearly to his mind, were competing for attention in the marketplace. Thus, the majority of his works are of small dimension. When looking through a number of Kenyon’s paintings, one is struck by the richness and variety of his vision and by the fact that each is a jewel reaffirming the adage multum in parvo.

Kenyon began his pursuit of his career as a painter in his hometown of Providence, RI, where he was a student at the Moses Brown School and then the Rhode Island School of Design. At the age of 21 he set off for the first of many voyages to Europe.

 In Paris he studied at the Academie Julian, meeting there other American students of painting, some of whom were to become his lifelong friends. With them he traveled to the Brittany peninsula, Holland, and Venice, sketching and painting all the while. In 1886 Kenyon held his first one-man exhibit at Hooper’s Gallery in Providence. He sold ten works, which helped to finance still another voyage to Europe, but this time one that ended in tragedy.

In September 1887 Kenyon embarked from Holland for the United States with the products of his year’s effort on the ill-fated liner William A. Scholten. Off the coast of Dover in a dense fog it was involved in a collision and sank. One hundred thirty lives were lost, and for some time Kenyon was included on the list of the missing. He was picked up after surviving six hours in the icy waters of the channel. He was to relate later that he had been on the bridge as the ship was going down and had witnessed the captain shoot himself. Kenyon survived without revealing a trace of fear for the sea, and the very next year he was once again off for Europe.

In 1890, in the company of Arthur Wesley Dow, Kenyon painted at Ipswich for the first time. He had discovered a landscape that reminded him of Brittany , but he was not yet ready to settle down, for he took several more trips to Europe and a most auspicious one at the end of 1899 with his bride Caroline. Upon their return from a year-long honey­ moon they settled in Ips.

Exerpted from a description of cover art in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 24Feb1984, Vol 251 No. 8

Kenyon’s paintings prior to 1900 were what one critic called “an intelligent Impressionism.” He applied his thin paint in flat planar touches, which gives his work a calm, quiet perfection of subtly shifting tone. This was abandoned during the Ipswich years for a freer plein-air Impressionism concentrating more on particular natural effects and depending less on formal structure in a house his parents had built for them on a lane off Labor-in-Vain Road, which overlooked the Ipswich River.

Kenyon was a kindly man but a loner who was lucky enough to have a modest income that allowed him the freedom to pursue his art free of marketplace concerns. Between 1913 and 1918 Kenyon exhibited regularly in the National Academy of Design shows in New York City. Here he was in the company of other American Impressionists such as Daniel Garber, Cecilia Beaux, and Carl Frieseke, all of whom, with the current interest in American Impressionism, have claimed their portion of the fame. The modest Henry Kenyon, who left a legacy of small, quietly wonderful paintings that mark a trail through the seasons of some 40 years, has yet to claim his share. – Eldon N. Van Liere, Ph.D.