Retrospective: John Frederick Kensett 1816-1872

October 30, 1985

It stays, that century. It peels from the ground and becomes this walk through a room. Trees move; oceans extend their arms farther for the sun, then for something beyond the sun. At the last no one waits on the shore; then the shore goes away. The sky farther than the sky burns without flame. A continent has disappeared in time for the artist to go where he went, farther than the sun, all the way back to the curved arm of land where the sea isn't real but a woman walks on the real shore with a man.