Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  Cannily, the illustrator began to build on the public’s expectations. International Studio magazine printed an interview in September 1923 in which Rockwell embellished his early humility: “Even the suggestion [that he solicit The Saturday Evening Post] raised Rockwell to such a rarified atmosphere that it at first made him dizzy. . . . Armed with two finished drawings and sketches of two other ideas, he journeyed to Philadelphia. Almost tremblingly he handed his drawings to an assistant in the office who carried them into a mysterious sanctum. Minutes of breathless suspense passed—the longest of the young artist’s life. Then the assistant returned with the pictures and Rockwell reached mechanically for the portfolio, feeling guilty at having even presumed” to approach the magazine, the awestruck journalist reported.

  Smitten with the affable artist’s innocence and humility, the journalist also observed how Rockwell’s humble nature extended to his art: the illustrator “especially likes to paint children, for their faces are not masked by self-consciousness, and old persons whose true characters have become impressed upon their faces by the hand of time.” Importantly, the writer continued, “success has not in the least removed the simplicity or the earnestness of his character. Today he is twenty-nine years old, and he dreads reaching the advanced mark of thirty in a few months.” Immaturity, or at least a lack of worldliness, the interview implies, maintains the integrity of Rockwell’s art. And, for all the self-conscious irony contained in Rockwell’s exaggeration about his advanced years, the truth prevails in this self-observation as well. He was afraid of losing touch with his youth, the realm that had gestated his art in place of the boyhood he had wanted.

  By this point, Rockwell’s reputation as a normal guy was encouraging businesses to use him to promote the trustworthiness of their products. Although most of his early endorsements were for companies unrelated to art, a 1923 issue of International Studio devoted a full page to showing him in his studio, using Devoe and Raynolds artists’ paints. This same publication had, after all, avowed that “the name of Norman Rockwell [is] quickly becoming more familiar to millions of Americans than that of Raphael.”

  One can only flinch for Rockwell when thinking of the sneering rebuttals such fatuous praise must have elicited from other artists of the time. Ill-informed accolades were exactly what Rockwell did not need. And the backhanded compliments that well-wishers offered skewed the truth about the illustrator’s own beliefs and aesthetic values. In spite of Rockwell’s lifelong admiration of much modernist painting, interviewers who wanted him to feel otherwise almost without exception worked the discussion until they got a quote that validated their own dislike of modern art. Typical of such overstatement was one journalist’s conviction that “modernist art strikes Rockwell as fanatical. He can not see why a picture that is indefinite as to subject, motive and the ability of its painter, is any higher art than one which is comprehensible to all humanity.”

  Rockwell’s genuine allegiance to the Old Masters did, undoubtedly, reassure his audience, though it was Rembrandt, not Rubens, whom he venerated. Rockwell read voraciously about Rembrandt, his life and person as well as his art. He admired his painting so deeply that he sought other ways to interact, mentally, with the great artist’s world. Even on a trivial level, Rockwell considered his inclusion of a dog in many of his illustrations sanctioned by the Master’s own ubiquitous mutt, often present in Rembrandt’s most high-blown paintings.

  Exactly when the artist developed his passion for Rembrandt—it appears to have been nothing less—is unclear. By December 24, 1921, the Literary Digest cover of Grandpa and Children is unambiguously modeled on Rembrandt’s deeply sculptured adult faces, with the flatter planes and rounded profiles of the children’s faces referring to typical Netherlandish portrayals of youth. A similar treatment of faces and light would be rehearsed in the June 24, 1922, cover for the same magazine.

  Such cozy domestic scenes induced a false sense of inclusion among many of the aspiring middle-class audience, reading into such narratives their own dreams: “Anyone seeing his work must . . . realize that one of the ingredients mixed with Rockwell’s paints is his genuine love for all his race.” What exactly “race” meant to this reviewer is unclear, but it certainly did not include people of color; until the 1960s, Rockwell did not make a black subject the center of even one painting. How grievous an omission was this?

  Over the next ten years, whenever Rockwell wanted to paint a black man on a Post cover—pretending that there was nothing political to such a request—Lorimer told him that the country wasn’t yet ready for such a move: colored people could only be presented in subservient roles, unless they were being illustrated in the context of a story within the magazine. Another illustrator, Alan Pyle, angered the Boss when he submitted a Thanksgiving cover with a black man holding the turkey; the painting was rejected and Pyle rebuffed for trying to create trouble. Lorimer placed his faith in a classless society unburdened by a loathsome leisured set, but he meant such a structure to develop through the rigorous work ethic that rewarded people on earned merit alone. He did not yet see evidence that America was ready for “colored” people to play a prominent role in representing the country’s immediate interests, and he had no desire to confound his readers with such a potentially revolutionary implication. Bothered by such narrowness, Rockwell, as usual, buried his unhappiness and faced the immediate reality of his audiences instead—after all, they were the source of his income and much of his self-esteem. He began to court more aggressively the image he’d already begun to shape as an apolitical person, so that he could avoid responsibility for trying to influence magazine policies. No religion, no politics, no ethnic origins: only the overspill of quotidian details that were meant, paradoxically, to evoke a sense of the universal.

  Of course, Rockwell was political, but he hoped that operating under the banner of tolerance, generosity, and goodwill to all would anchor him to neutral, unarguable values. And his commitments to such virtues were real; affable he might be, but he knew who he was in terms of character. For that reason, his fifty years of Boy Scout calendar covers proved a constant irritating reminder of the conflict between art and commercialism. After Rockwell painted the 1924 cover, the Boy Scouts, thrilled that the nation’s response to the illustration had been wildly enthusiastic, entreated him to do one the following year as well. Rockwell’s acquiescence initiated a lifetime routine toward which he felt ambivalent at best. Donating his time for the first few years, he then discovered that Brown and Bigelow, the calendar’s publisher, was a for-profit company. Relieved that he needn’t feel responsible for a charity’s financial well-being after all, he tried to beg off doing future Boy Scout calendars by explaining that his schedule no longer allowed him the indulgence. In response, Brown and Bigelow agreed to pay him more handsomely than he’d imagined possible, and Rockwell began to depend on the yearly commission for a major part of his family’s income.

  But if he thrilled at the prices he commanded with the St. Paul, Minnesota, company—as a young illustrator, he received the impressive sum of $500, and every few years, when he almost begged to quit, the company raised the salary by thousands, sometimes doubling the commission—he chafed at the artistic constraints that the Boy Scouts imposed. Subject matter, attention to detail that went even beyond the illustrator’s predilection, and style were all tightly controlled by the organization. In contrast to Lorimer’s approval, the Boy Scouts administration seemed determined, in Rockwell’s view, to send the painting back every year for some trivial change. He got to the point that he deliberately rendered something slightly off-base, so that he knew in advance what correction he would be asked to make.

  Rockwell’s calendar sold two million copies every year, the sale yielding tremendous coverage as well as good money. But precisely because he did value at least the appearance of disinterest in partisan politics, he grew to dislike the determinedly conservative social aura that clung to every Boy Scout calendar cover. By 1960, he finally began to s
peak up about such reservations. In 1924, however, he had more immediate claims on his attention than the luxury of ideological disputes.

  The drain of having Irene’s noisy family foisted upon him had eroded the evening reading routine he treasured to keep himself mentally sharp and focused for the studio. By spring, Rockwell was feeling the need to get away. The family ad campaign waged by New Rochelle Chamber of Commerce brochures extolled the virtues of the suburbs with pictures showing a beautifully dressed wife holding a happy baby, two decorous children, and one equally well-designed dog waiting for the returning patriarch at the (flower-bedecked) door of their happy home. Rockwell’s memory of his childhood home existed in counterpoint to such a family portrait, with his father commuting across Manhattan at the end of his workday for forty-five minutes in rush hour to run inside and tend to his needy wife. Now the artist was confronting yet another variation of this scene—no wife waiting at the door when he returned home from his studio, but a passel of demanding relatives instead, seeking his money and Irene’s attention.

  His restlessness was aggravated by the illness and death that seemed to be multiplying monthly in New Rochelle. Lucius Hitchcock, president of the New Rochelle Art Association, had seasoned his annual report with the gratifying news that New Rochelle contained more artists per capita than almost any other city in the United States. Before the year was over, however, he would bear more tenebrous news as well: Frank Leyendecker, fifty-one years old, was dead, and Coles Phillips, gravely ill with a kidney disease for which he was seeking treatment in Europe, clearly suffered with a terminal condition. Within the next ten years, not only Phillips but Clare Briggs, Edward Penfield, C. J. Munro, and Kenneth Clark would all be dead.

  Rockwell watched Frank Leyendecker’s demise up close. A family argument, with Charles Beach at the center, according to Rockwell’s embittered account, had ousted both Frank and his sister Augusta from the Leyendecker mansion. Rockwell helped Frank move into an empty garage under his own studio, though the depressed man never even unfurled the rug he stacked against the unfinished wooden planks. A victim of alcohol and drugs, Frank Leyendecker apparently died of an overdose, most probably of cocaine or heroin, both in plentiful supply at the time. Rockwell considered all three Leyendeckers innocent pawns in the pocket of Joe’s wily lover, Charles Beach, and his disgust at Beach’s manipulation of the family is unmistakable in his autobiography, where he likens the man to a “huge, white, cold insect clinging to Joe’s back. And stupid. I don’t think I ever heard him say anything even vaguely intelligent.”

  Given Rockwell’s typically understated avowals of affection throughout his life, his obvious fondness for the hardworking, gentle, and genteel Leyendecker brothers proved among the strongest emotions he felt for anyone outside his family. Impressed initially that the Leyendeckers, celebrities that they were, accepted him as a friend, Rockwell ended up surprised at the love he came to feel for the brothers, the warmth of friendship that grew up between them.

  Other deaths, not as emotionally significant to Rockwell, occurred within this time span. Rockwell’s great-aunt Anne Waring Paddock died, leaving her nephew Waring the executor of her will. The family had reason to assume they’d benefit at least somewhat from their friendly relative’s wealth, especially since her closer family members had died years earlier. Instead, she left only nominal gifts to Waring and Jarvis, both named after her father. Any hopes Rockwell had entertained of his parents’ financial liberation dissipated when the will was read. Rockwell sympathized with his father’s inevitable if politely masked disappointment; he, too, was feeling the sting of reality in his life as stress at home increased, the demands of too many people creating intolerable interference with his work.

  As usual, his mental state was enacted in several Post covers, the first published on June 7, 1924. The Daydreamer shows a bored office clerk, sitting at his desk but escaping his environment by dreamily recalling things past, the fantasy image of an old ship positioned over the Post logo as if to suggest the magazine itself as a means of escape for the bored middle classes. He would reprise the theme of the enervated worker on his May 16, 1925, cover, Man Playing Flute, in which an elderly clerk indemnifies the tedium of his dull desk job by stealing a few minutes to play the flute in his office. That workers would find their jobs so stultifying as to require compensatory fantasies or music breaks to get through the day proved an inevitable component of Lorimer’s American dream, the consolidation of a heterogeneous nation into one economically and culturally secure entity, unified against any outside threat. Rockwell valued the recompense over the job, implying that if man—specifically—is forced to confront the present moment without access to the imagination, it will prove unbearable.

  The year was taking its toll on Rockwell. His enthusiasm toward his work waned, especially the overload of advertising he had accepted, and toward his personal life as well. By the end of 1924, Rockwell decided he had enough of sharing his home and wife with her mother, sister, and two brothers. Hoddy alone was too much for Norman’s peace of mind: a decorated war hero, the large man suffered from nightmares that would cause him to fall out of bed at least once a night, hitting the floor with a loud thud that reverberated through all three floors. The larger-than-life brother-in-law felt himself entitled to whatever Rockwell could provide. “Pop also told me he had to finance two abortions for Hoddy,” Tom Rockwell recalls, his tone suggesting that his father thought the situation morally shaky.

  Perhaps a sense of being overwhelmed by so many family claims on his resources contributed to his decision in 1924 to separate from Irene when she refused to live alone with her husband after he requested that they find a place to live by themselves. “And leave my family?” she asked her husband in surprise. On affirming that he was asking her to choose, she didn’t hesitate to name everyone except her husband as her priority, as surely her husband knew would happen. The reality was that he needed an escape, and he put the responsibility on Irene; he realized that she would never kick out her family, and that she would have no desire to accompany him to Manhattan.

  Rockwell moved out of his own home, happy to have an excuse to return to the art world where he had established his identity ten years before. He installed himself in the Salmagundi Club, a house founded in the late nineteenth century by National Academy of Design students as a temporary home for artists, by this point located at 47 Fifth Avenue. The membership, dating from 1880, included Howard Pyle and, more recently, Charles Hawthorne, currently in residence at the League. Still an all-male institution in 1924, the club allowed Rockwell a few weeks, at least, to revel in the solidarity of his own kind—men who were doing art, and who gathered in the evenings to talk about it over their pipes and cigars.

  True to his belief that one’s craft was well served at any stage by study and practice, he registered at the Art Students League for the upcoming 1925 winter term, choosing an etching class taught by master Eugene Fitsch. George Bridgman, Joseph Pennell, and Charles Hawthorne were all teaching during this school year, but only Fitsch taught in the evening hours, from seven until ten, when Rockwell had finished his own work. Too, Rockwell had to calibrate carefully the distinction between presenting himself as a well-established professional and one of his teachers’ success stories. It would not do to appear too much the neophyte again. Etching was a return to a technique redolent of Dickens, not of Rockwell’s own art school days.

  Within weeks, Rockwell supposedly came down with a severe case of tonsillitis that landed him in the hospital; because Rockwell had his tonsils removed when he was a little boy, his use of the pseudo-illness probably substituted for a less seemly ailment. Either he or Irene seized the opportunity for a reunion, and as soon as Rockwell agreed to his wife’s demands for an expensive new house, she immediately convinced her family to return to Potsdam as her part of their deal. Rockwell thought the O’Connors had belonged in their spacious colonial homestead all along, instead of confusedly camping out with him and Irene to st
ave off loneliness and to escape what they considered too rural a location. After they left, Norman and Irene climbed into their shiny new roadster and drove to their “camp,” their little love shack on the St. Lawrence River, where the illustrator rested for a few weeks to regain his strength. He would come to rue the devil’s bargain he had struck with Irene: he regained his wife, but at the proverbial cost of his soul. However hard he had tried to escape becoming immersed in the moment, he was now firmly committed to being a creature of his day, which happened to be the Roaring Twenties.

  In The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel about the very rich among whose types Rockwell now traveled, Nick Carraway describes memorably the new context for the illustrator’s narrative imagination: “The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.