American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  Waring had a handsome face with brown eyes and a substantial mustache kept neatly trimmed. His speaking voice was deep and he sang bass in the church choir of his youth. When he was in his early twenties, he joined several amateur singing groups and his appearances were noted respectfully in the pages of The Yonkers Statesman. He warbled with the Canoe Club Quintet and sang in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, including the first production of The Mikado in Yonkers.

  Born on December 18, 1867, the youngest of three children, Waring grew up in a family that thankfully for him was less colorful than his wife’s. His father, John William Rockwell, was a wholesale coal dealer who ran his own business out of a landmark building, 1 Broadway in Manhattan. His mother, Phebe Boyce Waring, can fairly be described as Yonkers aristocracy. She was descended from the founder of the Waring Manufacturing Company, which was once the nation’s largest hat maker and at its peak turned out seven thousand hats a day.

  In the summer of 1891 Waring was twenty-three; Nancy was twenty-five. It is not known how they met, only that they had been dating for a few years and their relatives wondered if they would ever marry. Waring was willing to do whatever Nancy wanted. She wanted to marry that summer up in Crompton, Rhode Island, where she was living in the house of her older sister. And she wanted to marry in the Episcopal Church, which was fine with Waring although he had grown up attending services at the First Presbyterian Church. News of the nuptials made page one of The Yonkers Statesman, which reported, “The bride was attired in a handsome costume of white, with veil, and carried a bouquet of white roses … After a wedding tour, Mr. and Mrs. Rockwell will reside in New York City.”14

  The newlyweds rented an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a narrow brownstone at 206 West 103rd Street, off Amsterdam Avenue. They had been married for little more than a year when Nancy gave birth at home to their first son, Jarvis Waring Rockwell, Jr., on September 29, 1892.

  In less than a year, Nancy was pregnant again. On February 3, 1894, a second son was born. It was her turn to pick a name. Astoundingly, instead of naming him after her artist-father Howard or her adored brother Thomas J. Hill, she named him after a man she had never met—one Captain Norman Spencer Perceval, a minor British nobleman who had married her mother’s sister. The captain was still alive at the time, ensconced on Lowndes Street in London, and he appealed to Nancy’s nostalgia for an England she had never visited except in the mists of her imagination. Perhaps she hoped that Captain Perceval would leave some money to her son, or perhaps it was enough for her to know that she and her newborn, Norman Perceval Rockwell, by virtue of the name she had given him, were now linked for the ages to a name out of British royal history. She no doubt would have been thrilled to learn that Captain Norman Spencer Perceval was linked to the future Diana Spencer, princess of Wales, by a mere twenty-one degrees of genealogical separation.15

  Mary Ann Rockwell, the artist’s mother, later known as Nancy

  Rockwell always hated his middle name and believed that Perceval was about as embarrassing as any word ever appended to a boy.16 His mother was constantly reminding him to spell it correctly, the way that Captain Perceval did—the captain spelled it Perceval, as opposed to the common spelling of Percival. This may explain why Rockwell actually misspelled his own middle name in his autobiography. He spelled it throughout as Percevel, as if so anxious about overlooking the letter e that he inserted one in the place of every vowel.

  * * *

  People need something to carry their fantasies, and for Nancy Rockwell the lines and bloodlines of family trees were a convenient conveyor. In later life, she came to believe that her father, poor Howard Hill, was descended from British royalty. “My father’s great, great, great grandmother was Lady Elizabeth Howard, she was beheaded,” she noted in a letter to her daughter-in-law in 1946. At the time, she was reading a new historical novel about the girlhood of Elizabeth I, Young Bess, by Margaret Irwin. She highly recommended it, “if you wish to read something about my father’s ancestors.”17

  Rockwell, by contrast, had little interest in his ancestors. When he thought of his origins, he preferred to dwell on his artistic origins and various painter-gods to whom he felt connected. They were a far-flung lot, ranging from European masters like Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rembrandt, and Jean-François Millet to the American illustrator of pirates, Howard Pyle. The history of painting is its own extended family and the one from which Rockwell believed he inherited his best qualities.

  TWO

  NOT A NORMAN ROCKWELL CHILDHOOD

  (1894 TO 1911)

  In his later years, when Rockwell tried to picture his parents, one memory invariably sprang to mind. It is early evening in New York City and Norman, who is maybe ten or eleven, is sitting in the dim stairwell of the brownstone building where the family lived. He hears the front door of the building creak open and the sound of his father coming up the stairs. Waring, a textile salesman, is tired from his day at work and the hour-long ride on the trolley. He enters the apartment and Norman can hear him ask in his deep baritone, “Well, now, Nancy, how are you?”

  “Oh, Waring, I’ve had such a hard day. I’m just worn out.”

  “Now, Nancy, you just lie down on the couch there and I’ll get a cold towel for your head.”

  Waring would close the door and all Norman could hear was the sound of his mother’s lamentations. To his annoyance, his father would sit at her side, hat in his hand, dark eyes filled with understanding and sympathy, as if he had never heard her story before.

  Rockwell had a surprisingly unsentimental view of his childhood. He wrote his autobiography, or rather dictated it to his son Thomas Rockwell, in 1959, by which time his parents had died. He characterized his father as weak and ineffective. He spoke of his mother as a hypochondriac who occupied her days visiting doctors. She passed countless afternoons lying in bed or on the parlor sofa, the lamp turned low, a table of pills beside her. Rockwell later insisted that she spent most of his childhood supine. He wanted her to stand up. He wanted her to ask him about his day.

  “I was never close to my mother,” Rockwell noted matter-of-factly. “When I was a child she would call me into her bedroom and say to me: ‘Norman Perceval, you must always love and honor your mother. She needs you.’ Somehow that put a barrier between us.” He believed she had taken over his father’s life, reduced Waring to her nurse. It seemed to him that women were self-absorbed and men were the caring ones. Men were the ones to whom you could entrust your well-being.

  His father worked for the New York division of a Philadelphia-based cotton-goods company, George Wood Sons & Co. Every so often he would come home from the office beaming. And Norman knew instantly what had happened that day. Sitting down to dinner, after Nancy had said grace, Waring would unfold his napkin and arrange it carefully across his knees. Then he would announce with satisfaction, “Mr. Wood was in the office today.” And he would recount his conversation with Mr. Wood verbatim.

  Growing up, Rockwell felt neglected by his parents and overshadowed by his older brother, Jarvis, a first-rate student and athlete who was one year ahead of him in school. Norman, by contrast, was slight and pigeon-toed and squinted at the world through owlish glasses. His grades were barely passing and he struggled with reading and writing—today, he surely would be labeled dyslexic.

  “I wasn’t a regular Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer,” he later recalled. “I wasn’t an excessively brave kid. I wasn’t very healthy. My brother was quite the opposite, and this had a lot to do with my life. He later played semi-professional baseball and football. He was the real boy’s boy.” After reading The Little Lame Prince, a short story by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, Rockwell tried to garner notice by walking around school with an exaggerated limp and pretending to have just one hand. “I wanted to be an artist, or I wanted to be noticed as lame, or anything, because I felt I couldn’t compete with my brother because he was so strong and husky.”1

  Rockwell spent his first twelve years
in a series of cramped apartments in Upper Manhattan. When he was two years old, the family left West 103rd Street and moved up to 789 St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, which was considered a better neighborhood. Then, when he was six years old, he and his family moved in with his father’s elderly parents, at 832 St. Nicholas Avenue, on the corner of 152nd Street.2 It is not clear how Rockwell felt about his paternal grandfather, the coal dealer from Yonkers, whom he once described in an unpublished essay as “quite a swell” and “a gay blade” despite his financial losses in the depression-addled 1890s.3 He bequeathed Rockwell a hand-me-down that became the bane of his childhood: a “pretentious” double-breasted overcoat with a moss-green velvet collar that elicited mocking laughter from his classmates.

  Rockwell made no mention of the sadder events that occurred around this time. Grandma Phebe died in March 1903 and the funeral service was held in the apartment.4 Two winters earlier, there had been another death in the family: that of Rockwell’s Aunt Grace, not yet forty, his father’s sister and the mother of two boys, Sherman and Halsey, all of them ensconced in that same building on St. Nicholas Avenue.5

  Rockwell was a turn-of-the century kid, born just in time to observe the arrival of the twentieth century. Historians tend to describe this period as if everything considered modern—subways, movie theaters, tall buildings—arrived on cue with the new century. Yet the nineteenth century, with its bumpy cobblestones and gas lanterns, its dim apartments in which mothers gave birth, continued well into the twentieth century. And up on St. Nicholas Avenue, the nineteenth century had not fully departed. In the mornings, the men rushed to catch the trolley to work and the women stayed home, leaning on the sills of open windows and counting the errands that had to be done.

  Rockwell didn’t view his childhood as the beginning of the modern era. He didn’t see it as the beginning of anything. But perhaps it seemed like a time of endings. He was six years old when Queen Victoria, an ancient matriarch whose name had come to be identified with an entire age, died.

  Later that year, President William McKinley was visiting Buffalo, New York, when he was shot by an assassin. Rockwell never forgot “the horror in the streets” on the night of the president’s death, with newsboys shouting “Extra, extra” as people rushed from their apartments and huddled beneath the yellow glare of gas lamps to read the news; no one had a radio yet. The next day, Norman went to church with his family, and both of his parents cried.

  A devout Episcopalian, Nancy required her sons to say grace before dinner and to attend church. The family worshiped at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on West 141st Street and Convent Avenue6—for Norman, a dreary obligation that instilled in him a lifelong aversion to organized religion. He sang in the all-boys church choir year after year. This required three rehearsals during the week after school, the last of which, on Friday evenings, was a dress rehearsal. On Sundays, when Norman and Jarvis returned from church, the boys were forbidden from playing with their toys. Nor were they allowed to look at the funny pages. “We couldn’t read them until Monday,” Rockwell recalled.7

  Norman (right) and his older brother, Jarvis, display frogs they caught during one of their summers in Warwick, New York. Although Norman was taller than Jarvis, he claimed to feel physically outmatched by him.

  There was one part of his childhood for which he retained affectionate memories. In the summer, the family would take a two-week vacation in the Adirondack Mountains, on a working farm that rented out rooms. The place was owned by the sprawling Jessup family and located in the town that is now Warwick, New York. Years later, Rockwell recalled indolent afternoons when the grown-ups played croquet and the children were free to do as they pleased. What he seemed to cherish was the communality of it all. He warmed to the memory of hayrides on which everyone squeezed into a wagon and sang as the horses trotted along country roads. He recalled “the excitement of eating lunch with the threshing crew at the long board tables.”8

  The Jessup children thought of him as less hearty than the other children. “Norman was considered delicate and had to have eggnogs between meals,” Phebe Jessup noted years later. “One of my duties was to prepare them.”9

  * * *

  When did Rockwell realize he wanted to be an artist? He first demonstrated a talent for drawing when he was “six or seven,” as he recalled.10 His father was a casual smoker and in those days each pack of American Fleet cigarettes came with a trading card that portrayed a model of a battleship. Kids liked to collect the cards. Norman, instead, liked to copy them. With his pencil and eraser, he worked with great industry and concentration, careful to get every detail right. There was much smudgy erasing.

  His brother, Jarvis, was impressed by the drawings, so much so that he and his friends targeted them for immediate destruction. They would assemble whole fleets on the floor and, boom, declare war, trying to destroy each other’s ships with a pair of scissors. “It was a sort of frustrating art form for me,” Rockwell later said.11

  Actually, Jarvis drew pictures of ships as well, one of which can be found among the Rockwell family papers. It’s a charming crayon drawing, a battleship on stormy waters, four flags waving in the breeze. Although Norman always spoke of his brother as the family athlete, all brawn and strutting pride, the label was reductive. Jarvis was a dexterous child, good with his hands and fond of building. In later life, he ended up designing toys for a living.

  Norman soon graduated from sketches of battleships to scenes culled from literature. On weekday evenings, after he and Jarvis had finished their homework, the boys would sit at the dining room table as their father read novels to them. There was lots of Charles Dickens. Norman, hunched at the table, the ever-present pencil in his right hand, took great pains with his drawings. He worked slowly, revising as he went and seeming to erase almost as many lines as he drew.

  He later recalled sketching a likeness of Mr. Micawber while his father read David Copperfield, only to erase the head and ask his father to read the pertinent description again, the passage about Mr. Micawber’s bald cranium. So his father read it again, the sentence about this “stoutish, middle-aged person … with no more hair upon his head … than there is upon an egg.”

  Rockwell won his first prize in December 1905, for a now-lost drawing he entered in The New York Herald’s Young Contributors Contest. He was eleven years old.12

  * * *

  Despite his early interest in art, Rockwell did not visit a museum until he was quite a bit older. When he felt like looking at pictures, he scarcely needed to venture to the Metropolitan Museum. Instead, he might sit down at the dining room table and open up the latest number of Collier’s or Harper’s Monthly or St. Nicholas Magazine and pore over the illustrations, line drawings and paintings by Howard Pyle or Frederic Remington or Edwin Austin Abbey. In truth, there was more new art by American artists to be found in magazines than there was on the walls of museums.

  This was the period known as the Golden Age of Illustration, although it was only in nostalgic retrospect that the phrase encompassed events in America. Initially, it referred to a movement that began in London in the sixties—the 1860s, that is—when leading English artists tried their hand at wood engraving in order to furnish pictures for books and magazines. At the time, an artist could cross from easel painting to illustration with impunity. No one thought less of Sir John Everett Millais because he drew illustrations for Trollope novels that were published serially in the magazine Once a Week, although eyebrows did go up when he committed the mercenary sin of allowing his painting of a very blond, bubble-blowing boy (Bubbles) to appear on the wrapper of Pears’ soap.

  In America, magazine illustration didn’t gain much aesthetic momentum until the 1880s. It had to wait for the arrival of Howard Pyle, a brilliant Quaker artist and writer. He is often called the father of American illustration—a dreary cliché, but a fittingly patriarchal image for a man who spawned a progeny of famous illustrators, from N. C. Wyeth on down, and ran a school out of his studio
in Wilmington, Delaware. More important than the school was Pyle’s own oeuvre: a shelf of children’s classics that elevated American illustration to the level it enjoyed in Europe. His admirers included Vincent van Gogh, who once wrote, in a letter to his brother: “Do you know of an American magazine called Harper’s Monthly? There are things in it that strike me dumb with admiration, including sketches of a Quaker town in the olden days by Howard Pyle.”13

  Pyle was Rockwell’s favorite, hands down. Rockwell would study reproductions of his paintings of Colonial America and marvel at their vividness. When Pyle painted the story of the American Revolution, he imported the lofty goals of history painting—that is, factual accuracy—into the realm of popular illustration. He would track down the right musket and the right tricorn hat. He would labor to paint the right number of bricks in a background wall a hundred feet off.14 He wanted to relate the past at its most present, its most lifelike. His painting of George Washington at Valley Forge makes you feel the wind blowing through double-breasted buttoned-up coats, the crunch of boots on snow. When unsure about a certain detail, he might “run down to Washington and take a photograph.”15 And perhaps it was his camera eyes as much as anything that fascinated the young Rockwell.

  He particularly loved Pyle’s pirates, those long-haired, eye-patched thugs who kept their stolen booty in trunks. Here were Blackbeard and the rest, the seamen who terrorized the early American colonists. Although they came with the same guarantee of historical-authenticity-or-your-money-back as his other motifs, Pyle’s pirates—with their head scarves knotted in the back and hoop earrings—have since been exposed as mostly fiction. Their clothing has less in common with actual pirates’ duds than with the flamboyant outfits of Spanish gypsies. They reveal Pyle as a second-rate researcher but a fabulous illustrator and they became the go-to images for most every film about pirates.