Aron of Kangeq (1822–1869) was a painter and graphic artist known for his drawings, woodcut prints and watercolours. He was the first Kalaallit printmaker and is sometimes called “the forefather of modern Greenlandic art.” [1] Although mononymically known as Aron throughout his life, today he is typically referred to as Aron of Kangeq or Aron Kangeq after where he was born and lived, the now-defunct Moravian missionary community of Kangeq in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland).
Aron was a hunter who began making art in response to a call in 1858 to all Kalaallit by the governor of Kalaallit Nunaat, Hinrich Rink (1819–1893), to submit stories, maps and drawings for publication; Rink provided paint and drawing materials for them to do so. By some accounts, this 1858 call coincided with a period when Aron was bedridden with tuberculosis, which he battled until his death in 1869. [2] Impressed by Aron’s work, Rink later introduced him to European woodcuts and woodcutting techniques. [3] Throughout the following ten years of his life, Aron would return to artmaking when his illness forced him to be inactive for long stretches of time and sent his works to Nuuk (then called Godthåb), Kalaallit Nunaat, by kayak post for Rink to publish in his monthly newspaper, Atuagagdliutit. [4] He produced between 200 and 350 works during this period.
Aron’s work depicts hunting, cultural encounters, traditional stories and scenes from everyday life, including landscapes and interiors. Ak’igssiamik (c. 1860), one of his most famous works, is a woodcut he produced from one of his drawings that shows children playing with a stuffed sealskin ball. Unlike most people at the time, Aron could read and write Kalaallisuit, and writing plays a large role in his works: many are inked at the bottom with titles or captions describing the action. He was also a catechist at the Herrnhut congregation in Nuuk and portrayed a mix of spiritual belief systems in his artwork. A woodcut titled The Tale of Qooqqut (c. 1860), for example, depicts a popular folk story from 1850 about a man who refuses to get baptised and is visited by angels. Another, Qasapi kills Uungortoq (c. 1860), features a well-known Inuit traditional story that highlights early tensions between Inuit and Danish colonizers, where the Inuk hunter Qasapi is victorious in killing the invader Uungortuq.
Aron’s works are notable for their high level of detail, with fully realized backgrounds and specific settings that provide historians today with considerable context about life in Kalaallit Nunaat at the time. His attention to detail resulted in him producing a number of reference images for others during his lifetime, including diagrams of kayak implements, shoreline maps and, notably, drawings of ships in the Nuuk harbour in summer 1860, which would later become an essential tool helping historians piece together when cross-continental telegraph infrastructure was built. Another of his watercolours is the only known image of what Kangeq looked like during this time period. [5] However, Aron was not producing his works on his own: many of his woodcuts were created based on drawings or compositional elements done by other artists in his orbit, such as Jens Kreutzmann (1828–1899), and there are a number of woodcuts of his drawings which were made by Markus Lynge (1816–1892). Not all of Aron’s collaborations were publicly known or are evident today, but the Lynge woodcuts are generally distinguishable from ones made by Aron himself through each printmaker’s technical approach—Aron typically used linear hatching and grey tones to create a sense of depth, while Lynge used black-and-white imagery with limited hatching and significant negative space. [6]
During Aron’s lifetime, his work received considerable attention, as his pieces comprised the majority of works used to illustrate Rink’s collections of Kalaalleq folktales, Kaladlit okalluktualliait/Grönlandske Folkesagn. The first two volumes of this collection were published in 1859 and 1860 and later reissued together as The Native Greenlander: Folktales of Greenland in 2020 with Aron officially listed as the illustrator. Rasmus Berthelsen and Lars Aqqaluk Møller then published the pictorial album Kalaallit assilialiait (1860), which again contained primarily Aron’s works but also those from five other artists. The publication was distributed internationally, even as far away as Australia, and Aron gained international fame as the only listed artist, with popular British monthly The Bookseller describing him as “the Raffaelle of Greenland” in its June 1862 issue.
Despite this early success, Aron’s practice went largely unrecognized for the following hundred years until Eigil Knuth wrote a study of his works in 1948 and brought them to public attention throughout the 1960s. His work has since become a reference point for many Kalaallit artists, such as Hans Lynge (1906–1988) and Anne-Birthe Hove (1958–2012), the latter of whom produced a graphic series titled Homage til Aron (1997) based on woodcuts Aron made about the story of Aqissiaq. Surviving examples of his work can be found today in the collections of Nuummi Eqqumiitsulianik Saqqummersitsivik - Nuuk Art Museum; the Greenland National Museum and Archives, also in Nuuk; and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Norway, among others.