Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  Already, in 1945, Rockwell was willing, however, to let seep some of his boredom with the Boy Scout calendars. He explains to Jarman that he’d been having trouble coming up with a new subject each year, and that the Boy Scouts “are simply going to have to devise some new good deeds or Brown and Bigelow will be in a hell of a fix.” Rockwell tells the story of how he and leftist sympathizer Rockwell Kent have to send mail to each other frequently, since their names confuse their audiences. As at other times, when an anecdote about the two “Rockwells” unfolds from either man, a sweet warm generosity seems to suffuse the moment, though the two men never met. Rockwell explains about the studio fire—how he suspects he left a pipe burning near the curtains, and hot ashes ignited the cloth. Jarman, suspicious of the artist’s upbeat attitude toward the event, asked Mead Schaeffer his opinion, which ended with Schaef’s joke that Rockwell almost convinced him to burn down his own studio.

  As the New Yorker profile was appearing, the new art editor at the Post, Ken Stuart, introduced himself to Rockwell and discussed his understanding of the contractual agreement in spirit, if not in print, between Rockwell and the Post. The two men would always maintain an uneasy relationship, though in later years Rockwell thought it best to feign otherwise. Throughout the last half of the decade, Stuart and Rockwell jockeyed for position in the Post’s hierarchy: would Rockwell continue to have unlimited access to Ben Hibbs as his first line of defense, or would Stuart’s opinions reign, in terms of the selections of the magazine’s art? Alternating between a slippery imperiousness and an obsequious display, Stuart worried Rockwell from the start, not least because the artist already believed that in the wake of World War I, the art world had suffered from such professionals dictating to the artists what they should paint. On April 17, Stuart sent Rockwell a copy of Ben Hibbs’s letter of agreement to continue their old terms, though Stuart reminded Rockwell, who must have requested the document, that he had already told the illustrator that the contract is “self-renewing” anyway.

  Although Rockwell and the Post perpetuated the idea that Rockwell never was under contract to the magazine, presumably implying his superiority to the norm as well as his uncoerced faithfulness to the Post, a transitional period following Ken Stuart’s employment as art director included letters between Rockwell and the Post that clarify, indisputably, that however briefly, Rockwell did work under what he considered the onus of a contract. When he referred to this period a few years later in a letter to Ben Hibbs, he reminded the editor that when he was under the contract—presumably during Ken Stuart’s first few years—it had forbidden him from accepting any assignments from other magazines. As a result, his Post covers suffered, he explained, because he was suffocated by sameness. He needed the occasional outlet to stay fresh for the Post—exactly the reason he and Hibbs had returned to a no-contract agreement.

  The New Yorker profile provided Rockwell with even more clout than he’d previously held, and by the time the Rockwells returned to Arlington from their California respite, the artist was feeling eager to tackle the challenge of creating the next good idea. Mary, relieved at the positive tone of the article and her husband’s (albeit temporary) optimism, decided to tackle projects outside the domain of his work. First, she took up the subject of selling—finally—their first Vermont house, which they were still paying for while holding a mortgage on the West Arlington farmhouse as well. She had decided to invest, with John Fisher, the husband of her increasingly good friend, writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher, in the local joint movie theatre enterprise, which was in danger of going under—the Modern and Colonial Theatres in nearby Manchester Depot. It is hard to imagine Rockwell’s enthusiasm for the risky venture (which eventually lost money for the Rockwells), especially because much of its allure for Mary would have issued from its association with the well-off, older Fishers, who enjoyed performing public good deeds. But Rockwell’s earnings were particularly strong this year; by the end of December 1945, he had earned over $52,000. Their increasing financial strength—including a small family inheritance on the Barstow side—allowed Mary some leeway to direct their investments, and so her husband concurred with her plan. While she delved into the earnings and losses statements of the theatre with John Fisher, her husband began gathering photographs for the reference division of the Metropolitan Museum, which had finally requested Rockwell’s work—photographs of it, for their files on illustration.

  The boys, as usual, were thrilled to be out of school for the summer, and they spent most of their time on the village green, Tommy playing ball, Peter swimming in the nearby river, Jerry kind of wandering around, figuring out what was most interesting that day. One afternoon in early July, as the fourteen-year-old walked around the field where several boys were throwing a baseball, someone threw particularly poorly and hit a tree, the ball then ricocheting off and smacking Jerry’s head. He stumbled home, where several minutes of vomiting and the urge to sleep convinced his parents to call the doctor. Within the hour, he was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, his mother and doctor at his side. “My mother said that the doctor forced her to listen to him gossiping all the way to the hospital about someone they mutually disliked, just to take her mind off of my injury,” her son remembers.

  Jerry’s skull was fractured, and he stayed in the hospital for several days until it was determined that the concussion he suffered was healing. His father must have been terrified, remembering the death of his favorite child model, Billy Paine, from the same type of injury. But Jarvis remembers that his parents emitted the calm and controlled aura the sons had come to associate with them in almost all circumstances, except when they were roughhousing or all playing loud “boy” games. Still, the family was frightened, and they were ambivalent about the private drama being publicized in national newspapers. Almost immediately, letters from professional associates of his father’s started pouring in, expressing their regret at the news. Many of them combined their best wishes for the son’s recovery with a request for an update on their commission’s progress, which Mary Rockwell dutifully provided. When the artist painted his October Post cover that summer, he made a point of including Jerry as one of the models in the scene of a returning Marine who sits among his neighbors sharing war stories.

  Apparently, Rockwell was convinced of Jerry’s full recovery by August, at least according to F.B.I. reports. Scouting among artists for clues as to participation in the July 21 Manhattan convention for the New York State Communist party, the agency kept an eye on Rockwell. Entered into his file, alongside a report of the July convention, is a notice that an informant who has “furnished reliable information in the past” advised them that in August, Rockwell was mentioned as one of the 150 leading artists who had contributed to a collection of paintings and sculptures presented to the Soviet Union by the Art Committee of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.

  An entirely legal enterprise, the Council aimed at preventing the very Cold War that in fact ensued after World War II. The F.B.I. file makes it clear that the agency, under J. Edgar Hoover’s direction, would keep tabs on Rockwell from now on.

  Mary spent much of August getting Jerry, his recovery complete, ready for boarding school. At Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s suggestion, he was entering Oakwood, the Quaker school in Poughkeepsie, where, everyone agreed, the boy who seemed always to keep his own counsel might thrive, though at $450 per semester, tuition was a bit steep. Certainly he had never felt authentic in the local Arlington school, where he was supposed to fit in with a rural population that had little in common with his own household, in spite of what he felt appearances were meant to suggest. “We didn’t even read the Post in our home,” he laughs. “My dad subscribed to The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, more the kind of writing he enjoyed.” Tommy, luckily, managed to do well at just about anything. Popular with girls for his good looks, and with boys for the skills he learned with the kids next door, he also made high grades and followed his mother’s love of reading and
writing. In the summer of 1945, the older boys, however temporarily, seemed well situated; Peter, by contrast, was having problems his mother didn’t know how to solve.

  “Between fourth and ninth grades,” he remembers, “I just kind of dropped out mentally. Everything seemed boring to me; I was bright, quick, and I felt wrongly harangued by teachers who lacked imagination from what I could see. I made the worst grades possible, barely passing each year, even though the teachers knew I could have had the best grades in their classes. So I wasn’t exactly popular with them either, as well as the bullies outside the classroom who really enjoyed picking on me.”

  The various stresses of the year were exacerbated by having Nancy Rockwell nearby in Bennington, even though Rockwell’s mother acted as though they lived hundreds of miles apart. She complained at how little they visited with each other, and sought ways to move to a more luxurious accommodation, in spite of the expensive residence she inhabited already. In February 1946, she wrote a lengthy letter to Mary, exclaiming that she at least read about Norman in the Bennington papers, and that she couldn’t listen to the radio shows her daughter-in-law suggested, because she was so deaf that the necessarily loud volume she used annoyed the other residents. She hoped to go to a movie with the good cousins visiting her from Providence, though she feared she could not if her check from Norman didn’t arrive that day. She was enjoying reading Young Bess, by Margaret Irwin, a fictional account of the romance between Thomas Seymour and the future Queen Elizabeth I, which reminded her happily of her own illustrious family heritage. She ended by ensuring that Mary knew how much the friends that Nancy made earlier in Arlington hoped that Rockwell’s mother will return in the spring to live among them, a prospect that surely aggravated the cold Mary was fighting at the time.

  While Mary kept Nancy away from her son, he completed the painting the Post would use on its April 6 cover, The Charwomen in the Theatre. If Rockwell’s kindly presentation of many of the lower-class workers in his Post covers feels uncomfortably close to condescension, the cleaning women collapsed in exhaustion, but vivified by reading the Playbill after the show is over, evade such charges. Here, at least, the women look properly tired, not merely glossed over. And the intense interest with which they read the program inspires respect in the viewer for their refusal to be victims. Ken Stuart, in Rockwell’s view the still-new art director, urged the Post’s prominent artist to pursue his talent for tapping into the heartland of America. Over the next few months, Rockwell worked out special cover ideas with Stuart, including his participation in a grassroots journalism series that Stuart dreamed up. However proscriptive the art director’s newly enlarged role felt to the artist, it also relieved him of having to think up every idea himself. In May he traveled to Paris, Missouri, to judge poultry shows as part of the plan to describe America’s weekly newspapers, and then rushed home to receive several art students visiting his studio sporadically throughout the month.

  Word had gotten out not only to art students that Arlington was a great place to look at illustration up close. Through his friendship with Jack Atherton, George Hughes, a stylish illustrator a generation younger than Rockwell, had decided to join the choice community of artists. He and his wife, Casey, loved to ski, and they were ready to exchange the more social circles they’d inhabited the last few years for the rural atmosphere Jack had found transformative for his own work. Known primarily for fashion drawings and illustrations of romantic stories, Hughes wanted to develop as a consistent Post artist; the magazine had already solicited his work. Underestimating the challenges of running a farm, the couple bought their own and promptly threw a party to meet the town’s artists. Norman convinced them to make it a costume party, and he came in an elaborate eighteenth-century military uniform—“He loved costume parties,” remembered Hughes, decades later. On another occasion, Rockwell asked Hughes to accompany him to a party with a theme of the World War I armistice. The men rented French-Algerian soldier costumes from a theatrical costume supplier in Manhattan that Rockwell had used often, and Hughes remembers that they had a riotously good time.

  By this time, the Rockwells had become more than casual, if less than close, friends with John and Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Mary joined in the library board’s reading of new books, in the process screening literature for the Book-of-the-Month Club, which Dorothy advised, and helped appropriate the tiny library’s funds for future purchases. Dorothy had found herself reaching out to the community during the past year even more than usual, as solace for her son’s death in the Philippines the previous summer. From her own children’s comments, it appears that Mary Rockwell almost idolized the powerful woman, as did many others. Her academic background—a Ph.D. in French literature from Columbia University—and her publications record—she had published everything from a book on Montessori teaching methods to novels to children’s literature, these last in the genre of parent-child question-and-answer stories that Rockwell had illustrated when he was starting his career—combined to make her a daunting figure. But her devotion to communal welfare meant that she involved herself deeply with the Arlington community, and she especially enjoyed encouraging people like Mary, who was trying to combine dedicated mothering with developing her own nascent literary talents.

  The Fishers also quietly worked to support liberal causes, and, during this summer, they and the Rockwells signed a letter to the president of the University of Vermont commending the sorority that had recently bucked the system in order to accept a “young colored woman.” The letter asked that President Millis pass on to the students the four signatees’ “great pleasure in learning from their action, that there is still vitality in Vermont’s old, humane tradition of fair play to all, and that each individual shall be valued—or not—only on his personal worth.” In the response she sent to the group, the dean of women contrasted the Fishers’ and Rockwells’ generous, unsolicited shows of support to the criticism of the Alpha Xi Delta girls that she continued to receive daily.

  Rockwell corresponded during this same period with the Bronx Interracial Conference regarding race relations. And, except for the occasional porter, blacks continued to be conspicuous for their absence on his Post covers. George Horace Lorimer had left the Post in 1937, and certainly by the time of Ben Hibbs’s ascension to editor in chief, in 1942, Rockwell could have dared to push the issue. Still, unless he was asked to compromise his painting or to paint a scene that flouted his deeply held beliefs, he was unlikely to protest such cultural omissions; his validation at the hands of the Post’s staff, and his glorification through its public, were more important. He would express his social liberality elsewhere.

  In spite of the liberal politics that Rockwell shared with Dorothy Canfield Fisher, he could never shake his ambivalence toward her. Certainly he was less categorical in his thinking or response than she was—and less vocal, as well. Although he voted for the Socialist candidate for president in 1948, Norman Thomas, he allowed fellow Vermonters to assume he supported the Republican candidate instead. Thomas appealed to many of Rockwell’s core beliefs, even if at first glance, the pacifist would not seem a natural choice for the man who illustrated the Four Freedoms. But both men held to positions that would later become mainstream liberal tenets: for a minimum wage, against child labor; against communism as embodied in Stalinist Russia, but for a communal, compassionate government involved in its citizens’ lives. During Rockwell’s early career, Thomas had been a Presbyterian preacher, ministering to the poor in Harlem. After he left the pastorate to become a politician, he carved out a kind of patriotism extremely congenial to Rockwell. One of his professions of faith that would have resonated easily with the illustrator held that “If you want a symbolic gesture, don’t burn the flag; wash it.”

  But Rockwell kept his own close counsel about things political, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher thought that a mistake. The artist thought that the best way for him to reach the largest audience—with stories he believed in painting—was to let people hop
e he voted their way, as long as that way was consonant with democracy. Fisher was more vocal, and to Rockwell, at least according to Mary’s comments about his dislike, she was cleverly self-congratulatory in her promotion of such writers as Richard Wright and Isak Dinesen. Mary insisted that her husband was simply irritated that Fisher sparkled at social gatherings and took the attention off him. Probably there was envy involved, but even the celebratory preface Fisher had written in the spring for a fall publication about Rockwell, Arthur Guptill’s Norman Rockwell: Illustrator, sounded some notes that would have seemed patronizing to the shrewd artist. In defending Rockwell’s neglect of the negative side of life, she claims that his omission of tragedy can’t be aimed only at pleasing the public or he’d paint nature, which has a huge audience, and he fails to take that path. “He purposefully makes his own choice from an inner necessity. Every artist learns early, or he is no artist, that he must drink out of his own cup, must cultivate his own half-acre, because he never can have any other.”

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher did make the important point that until now had been mentioned only casually: Rockwell’s debt to seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters. Although the illustrator admired Vermeer’s mastery greatly (on a trip to Delft he even proudly figured out the exact window Vermeer looked out to capture a certain quality of light), it was the painters considered more strictly within the genre tradition that Rockwell emulated, including Ter Borch, Jan Steen, and, especially, Pieter de Hooch. Years later, Peter Rockwell, himself an art historian, would second this selection, insisting that de Hooch, not Vermeer, most strongly informed his father’s treatment of light; and even local publications such as Vermont Life within a year of Guptill’s book declared that Rockwell should be ranked with “great genre painters,” though the writer suggested that we link him with American artists such as George Caleb Bingham. Still, as the Manhattan dealer Michel Witmer insists, “the brilliant way that Vermeer pulled off a fluffy beauty in the face of the everydayness of things is surely ancestor to Rockwell, just as Velázquez’s clever rendering of even great people as humble and real explains Rockwell’s admiration of the Spanish painter.”