American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  In 1959 Rockwell’s painting Family Tree graced the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. It traces a little boy’s genealogical origins back several generations, to, of all people, one of Pyle’s black-bearded pirates. Readers of the Post interpreted the painting as a joke about unsavory relatives, but it was also a touching acknowledgment on the part of Rockwell that he saw Pyle as the patriarch of his family, that is, the family of illustrators with whom he felt closely identified.

  Perhaps Howard Pyle struck him as the realized version of Howard Hill. The two Howards. One a pauper, the other a legend and an appropriately potent figure for a boy to want to claim as a forebear.

  * * *

  In September 1906 when Rockwell was twelve years old, his city days came to an end.16 Later, he tended to speak of New York City as a menacing place and shuddered at the memory of a scene he had witnessed one winter afternoon—not a violent crime, just a couple having a drunken argument in a vacant lot. Brandishing an umbrella, the woman struck the man until he fell to the ground. She “became my image of the city,” Rockwell wrote, as if the woman were the evil twin of the Statue of Liberty.

  But one shouldn’t read too much geographical bias into this, because Rockwell would come to feel similarly imperiled in Mamaroneck, New York, a quiet, woodsy suburb where his family settled. Grandpa Rockwell made the move with them, into a rented house whose address is now 415 Prospect Avenue, near the corner of Fenimore Road.17 Though hardly grand, at least it was a house, a spacious white clapboard with a long front porch and a garden in the back. It had three bedrooms and sunny windows. When Norman stood on the corner and looked south, he could catch a glimpse of Long Island Sound; in the summer the water was full of sails.

  He went through public school in Mamaroneck and already art was his main interest.18 It was, in truth, the only subject on which he could concentrate, that forced his sprawling thoughts into focus. Whenever a teacher turned to face the blackboard, or looked down at a lesson book for any length of time, he would resume drawing on the pad that he carried with him. He was still going through his Howard Pyle–pirate phase and most of his drawings involved tautly muscled men and eye patches and sword fights.

  In October 1906 the family joined St. Thomas Episcopal Church, a handsome country church in Mamaroneck on a hill overlooking the sound.19 For the next year and a half, until his confirmation, Rockwell attended services every Sunday and once again sang in the choir. It was “less arduous”20 than the choir at his previous church, which was a relief. Yet he did not seem to care for the rector, the Rev. Frank F. German, and was bothered by his method for polishing the cross on the altar. “He’d spit on it and rub it with a soiled cloth,” Rockwell recalled, and you suspect the gesture was less an affront to his spirituality than to his sense of cleanliness, which was already becoming obsessive.21

  He found his own house shabby. He later recalled the “pinched and faded tidiness” of the front parlor, with its yellowed, washed-out antimacassars on the sofa. He even remembered the texture of the bath towels, which his mother didn’t bother to replace “until the nap was worn away and you could see through them.”

  His parents were always scrimping and saving, fretting over pennies. His mother would ask, “Waring, should we have a roast this Sunday?” And Waring would reply, “Not this week, I think, Nancy.” Instead they had stew. Hardly a catastrophe, this business of stew, but Rockwell, like many boys, was beset by exaggerated feelings of deprivation.

  As he entered adolescence, he came to believe that in every way that mattered he was powerless. He harbored no hope that he might ever possess the physical prowess of other boys. He did not train for any teams and learned to accept the bitter fact of his brother’s seemingly effortless popularity. “Bob Titus, a big, handsome athlete who had been my closest friend,” Rockwell lamented of a boy who lived on his block, “drifted away from me and began to hang around with Jarvis.”22

  It did not help that he grew up at a time when the male body—as much as the mind—had come to be viewed as something to be improved and expanded. In addition to celebrity bodybuilders like Eugen Sandow, better known as Sandow the Magnificent, President Theodore Roosevelt himself was an advocate of body modification. Much of Rockwell’s childhood (ages seven to fifteen) took place during the daunting athleticism of Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency. All of America knew the story of how he had transformed “his ‘sickly, delicate,’ asthmatic body into the 200-pound muscular, barrel-chested figure of a supremely strong and energetic leader,” as historian John F. Kasson puts it.23 He was the naturalist-president who hiked for miles and hunted big game; after leaving office, he sailed to Africa and posed for photographers in a pith helmet and safari gear. In the T.R. era, the well-developed male body became a kind of physical analogue to America’s expansionist, big-stick foreign policy. To be a good American was to build your deltoids and acquire a powerful chest.

  Rockwell tried exercising, hoping for a transformation. In the mornings, he diligently did push-ups, knee bends, and jumping jacks in front of the half-length mirror in his bedroom. But the images he glimpsed in the mirror—the pale face, the narrow shoulders, and the spaghetti arms—continued to strike him as wholly unappealing.

  At least he had art. He was beginning to get recognition for it at school. Miss Julia M. Smith, his eighth-grade teacher, a single woman in her late thirties, would ask him to come up to the front of the classroom and draw pictures in chalk on the blackboard as the other students watched. When she was lecturing on American history, he drew Revolutionary soldiers and covered wagons, the sort he knew well from the work of Pyle. When the subject turned to science, he drew birds and lions and other members of the animal kingdom.

  Miss Smith fussed over his drawings. She made him feel that he was artistic and hence special and not required to live by the rules, that being artistic somehow made up for his failure to excel at baseball. He would keep in touch with her for the rest of her life, and she is the one of the few people from his childhood for whom he admitted to feeling a special fondness. Later, he would marry three times and each time he married a schoolteacher.

  On September 7, 1909, Norman began his freshman year at Mamaroneck High School and three years of unremitting academic struggle. His school transcript is an alarming document, lined with grades that hovered just a few points above passing. Compared to Jarvis, a solid student, Norman was always perilously close to flunking. During his freshman year he was required to take Latin and perform dreaded feats of memorization. Later, he took two years of French and felt overwhelmed by irregular verbs.

  The subject that gave him the most trouble was math. In his sophomore year, he studied algebra and was confounded by the flurry of x’s and y’s that were suddenly descending in the spaces where numbers used to be. He got a grade of 50 in algebra his first quarter, which must have seemed like a new low, until his third term when he scored an impressively abysmal 28.

  During his high school years, he drew caricatures and imagined becoming a professional cartoonist. His mother’s cousin John Orpen, the president of the Providence Ice Company, was amused by sketches that portrayed him as a lowly laborer, “chopping ice behind the ice wagon.” When the Mamaroneck High School opened, it was reported, Rockwell “did the mural decorations, which consisted of charcoal and pencil sketches, mostly caricatures of the teachers on the newly kalsomined walls.”24

  It was the heyday of humor magazines, which were well-stocked with caricatures and cartoons. Life was the most genteel of the lot (it was unrelated to the magazine of the same title founded later by Henry Luce). Judge was a cheap-looking rival with bad-taste jokes about women, blacks, and immigrants. Puck was located in the landmark building still known as the Puck Building on Lafayette Street in New York. One day when he was in the city Rockwell went around to all three magazines and showed his drawings to various art editors. They were very kind, insisting that his work showed the greatest talent. Then they recommended that he go to art school. He was crushed. />
  * * *

  Rockwell perpetuated certain inaccuracies concerning himself and his life. He preferred to make make his life into a comic story and so took liberty with facts. For instance, although he described his mother as a self-absorbed invalid, she and Waring were both inordinately supportive of his efforts at art. His mother, especially, raved over his pen-and-ink drawings. She was sure he had inherited his talent from her father and her brother. She thought even his most tortured drawings showed promise and preserved the ones he did not throw out, pasting them into scrapbooks.

  “I regret to tell you, for fear of spoiling a good story,” Rockwell said in one of his earliest interviews, decades before his autobiography offered a conflicting account, “that both my parents encouraged my drawing energetically from the time I was a small boy.”25 Moreover, when he entered Mamaroneck High School, his mother “made arrangements” with his teachers to have him excused early so he could take classes at prestigious art schools in New York City. Initially, he went once a week to the New York School of Art, popularly known as the Chase School, after its founder, William Merritt Chase. Then he switched to the National Academy of Art, where he enrolled in the antique class and found himself seated in a large room ringed by white casts of Venus and Hercules. “The reason why you’re studying in what they call antique class is because the model doesn’t move,” Rockwell later explained.26

  The 1910 census listed the Rockwells as a large clan. Waring continued to scrape by as a “salesman, dry goods.” His widowed father, John W. Rockwell, was still living with the family, and Mrs. Rockwell’s thirty-year-old niece, Eva Milnes, was also listed as a boarder. Norman was now sixteen years old, and Jarvis, at seventeen, was described as a “clerk, shoe store.”

  The detail is puzzling. Jarvis selling shoes. Although he had been an excellent student, he dropped out of high school after his junior year. “Entered business in New York City,” reports a note on the back of his school transcript. His parents never considered sending him to college. College, as they saw it, was for boys from rich families. Like many other financially strapped parents of their time, Waring and Nancy expected their sons to enter trades as soon as they could and help supplement the household income.

  Norman, too, felt pressured to earn money and was working at various part-time jobs. In the summer of 1910 a wealthy matron mentioned to the Rev. German at his church that she and a friend were thinking of taking art lessons. The friend turned out to be Ethel Barrymore, whom Rockwell was happy to oblige. Barrymore, at the time a young Broadway actress who spoke in a noticeably throaty voice, had just bought a summer place in Mamaroneck, in the exclusive Orienta section, a strip of shoreline fringed with mansions. She had already been sketched by portraitists including John Singer Sargent, although it did not occur to sixteen-year-old Rockwell to ask her to pose. Instead, he was content to carry her paint box and paddle the two women in a canoe across Mamaroneck Harbor to Hen Island. He would set up their easels and supplies and watch as they dipped the tips of their brushes in little mounds of pigment that he had taught them how to mix. After an hour, it was time for a picnic lunch and then the return trip.

  At the end of that summer, he secured another job serving Mamaroneck’s elite. He took over the mail route in Orienta. It was too far from downtown to be serviced by a regular mailman, so residents paid for private delivery. On weekday mornings, before school, Norman would bicycle to the post office, load a pile of letters into his shoulder bag, and head off on his route. He liked bicycle riding—liked whisking through town in the pale light of early morning.

  In May 1911, at the end of his junior year, Norman dropped out of high school and made plans to study art in New York. He claimed in his autobiography that he dropped out in the middle of his sophomore year, perhaps an innocent confusion of dates.27

  He was seventeen years old and his boyhood was over. But it would live on in his paintings. Boyhood would be one of the great themes of his art and it would give him the chance to rewrite the whole story.

  THREE

  THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE

  (SEPTEMBER 1911 TO 1912)

  In October 1911 Rockwell enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, which occupied a palatial building on West Fifty-seventh Street. The League liked to think of itself as a progressive place, the antiacademic academy. It issued no grades, kept no attendance records, and prescribed no specific course of study. Students could sign up on a monthly basis with any artist-professors who interested them or drop classes with impunity. For Rockwell, the League was appealing because it was the only art school in the city where book illustration was taken seriously. Howard Pyle had been a student a generation earlier, as had Frederic Remington, and Rockwell was eager to will himself into their lineage.

  At the League, Rockwell found himself among teachers and art students who provided him with his first taste of New York bohemia. Everyone, it seemed, espoused radical politics and read poetry and had seen the latest issue of Mother Earth, Emma Goldman’s anarchist magazine. This is not to imply that Rockwell became a teenage bohemian. At seventeen, he was one of the youngest students at the League, just out of high school and inexperienced in the ways of the world. Most of his classmates were in their twenties and living on their own. They came to the League not only to study art, but for the privilege of being young and penniless in New York. Rockwell, by contrast, was still living with his parents in sleepy Mamaroneck and commuting to the city by train. On Fridays, he would diligently lug home his portfolio and show his parents his latest figure studies. Against all reason he hoped to impress them, to justify his presence at school. Unlike the National Academy of Design, the League charged tuition—eight dollars a month for each class, which was a sacrifice for his family.

  Among his classmates, he quickly became known as an exceptional draftsman if a somewhat awkward presence. At this point, he had curly hair and was so gangly he appeared to be taller than he was (he stood just under five foot eleven). He concentrated on his work with a single-mindedness that earned him the nickname “The Deacon.” Women were among the students at the League, but he was not friendly with any one in particular. By his own admission, he was surprised by the work habits of his fellow students, so many of whom seemed capricious, even reckless, working when the whim took them, even in the middle of the night. Rockwell, by contrast, would never work through the night. And he would never miss lunch.

  He was aware he was different from the other students, perhaps more ambitious, or just more inhibited, and he felt excluded from the camaraderie of school life. The third-floor lunchroom was the League hangout and, throughout the day, students and teachers along with art-class models who had tossed on bathrobes conversed over coffee and cigarettes. Once, Rockwell was taken aback when a stylish art student with longish hair visible beneath a wide-rimmed hat, accosted him in the lunchroom and remarked unkindly, “You know, if I worked as hard as you, I could be as good as Velasquez.” Rockwell replied, “So, why don’t you?”1

  In truth, he was bothered by his punch-the-clock work habits and wondered if his regular hours suggested some flaw in his nature. He once read somewhere that Sir John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, had swooned when he first saw the Mona Lisa. Rockwell later joked that he would go up to the Metropolitan Museum, stand in front of a Rembrandt he loved and order himself, “Swoon, damn you, swoon.”2

  * * *

  The League offered two courses in “Illustration and Composition” and, on his first day of school, Rockwell signed up for both of them.3 But the nuts and bolts of illustration turned out to be less compelling than he had anticipated. A few weeks later, he dropped Ernest Blumenschein’s illustration course and signed up instead for “Life Drawing for Men,” which was taught by George Bridgman, the most celebrated teacher at the League, and certainly the one who was to have the largest influence on Rockwell.

  Bridgman was then in his forties, a short, stocky, cigar-smoking aesthete who swore liberally. His class met every
afternoon, from 1:00 to 4:30, and was limited to male students; women had their own life-drawing class, in order to be spared the impropriety of viewing an unclothed model in mixed company. The classes always began on time and Rockwell was predictably punctual, rushing to retrieve his supplies—his charcoal and scrapers and Michalat drawing paper—from his locker and then joining his classmates as they took their places on hardwood chairs arrayed in three long rows in front of the model, who was elevated on a platform. Rockwell, like the other men in the class, showed up in a button-down white shirt and a vest, no smock.

  The mood in Bridgman’s class was hardly relaxed. Too many young men, sometimes as many as forty, were crowded into the airless studio, all of them sketching the same model. Every Friday afternoon, Bridgman ranked the students and their drawings; each young man desperately wanted to be number one, to be confirmed in his belief that art was his obvious destiny. Each student sought to produce what his teacher called, with more than a little vanity, a “Number 1 Bridgman drawing,” as if that represented a new plateau of human achievement.

  In reality, a Bridgman drawing was pretty much like the standard academic drawing of that era, or really of any era. For centuries, figure drawing had been the foundation of art education and its fundamentals were essentially the same. Bridgman, as much as Thomas Eakins in the nineteenth century or Leonardo in the sixteenth, approached the human body as a feat of engineering, stressing its mechanics and basic dynamics instead of surface modeling. For students, the goal was to capture not merely the curve of a torso or a thigh, but to understand the muscles and bones that lay beneath it and gave the body its shape, to become acquainted with the tibia and the ulna and the femur and the humerus—a roster of Latinate words that had to be memorized. Bridgman wrote many manuals for artists, one of which was devoted exclusively to the human hand.