From his beginnings, which were dazzling, the artist freely switched from landscapes of prodigious boldness — "The Voorhaven," around 1895 — to more traditional and exquisitely sensitive portraits like the profile of a Dutch woman from Zeeland.
The standout here is Rockwell Kent, whose leftist leanings hardly interfered with his prodigious fame as a powerful image-maker: his boldly rendered landscapes and heroic figures, as well as his satirical drawings, were frequent fare in illustrated books and popular magazines, including Life and Vanity Fair.
The ski industry is a particularly relentless driver of development, disfiguring landscapes on a massive scale, causing traffic, and emitting prodigious amounts of carbon.
Making prodigious use of maps, prints and drawings of the period, Longstaffe-Gowan, who is a landscape architect, creates a fascinating portrait of the slender, often brick-walled gardens that lay, and still lie, behind London's town houses, the kind of garden where Lady Bellaston might have tried to entertain a reluctant Tom Jones.
His public output in the last decade of his life remained prodigious but it was marked too by some deeply personal works, not least the landscapes he painted of the countryside and rural life around his new estate at Het Steen outside Antwerp – a demesne befitting his station.
"Encyclopedias," the author comments in a flourish of sententiousness typical of his style throughout, "are like immutable cycloramas, prodigious projectors whose reels have gotten stuck and which show, with a kind of maniacal fixity, a landscape which, because it is condemned to be only and for all eternity what it was, will at the same time grow older, more decrepit and more unnecessary".
Her symphonic landscapes are inflected with myriad accents, cultures, personal narratives — all stored away in a prodigious memory.
This species of entertainer has mostly vanished from the show business landscape, where the wondrous capabilities of plain-old human beings are increasingly being enhanced, if not replaced, by the prodigious gadgetry of the digital age.
Prodigious activities beckoned.
His philanthropy was prodigious.
