From one week to the next, Rockwell was able to produce a Number 1 Bridgman drawing—a technically polished, if emotionally void, figure study, one whose separate elements he had painstakingly executed over four or five days at a specified rate of progress. Even so, Rockwell was a nervous artist. His success at drawing never struck him as guaranteed. Each new figure study posed its own risk, opened up the possibility of getting everything wrong.
Besides, Bridgman was as tough with him as with anyone else. The teacher didn’t hesitate to correct directly on the students’ work, redrawing an awkwardly pitched shoulder or a badly proportioned leg. Once Rockwell showed him what appeared to be an adequate study, only to hear: “You haven’t got the main line of action. Look here. Down through the hip.” And then the teacher demonstrated, drawing a heavy black line down the middle of the figure. Rockwell spent the next day trying to erase Bridgman’s corrections so his parents wouldn’t think he was failing at school.
* * *
Over the years, many artists have described their astonishment at first sketching a female nude, the rush of pleasure and embarrassment, the intense awkwardness pervading the studio as a group of young men shyly looked and lost their visual virginity en masse, their cheeks blushing, their hands trembling. Inevitably, they botched their first drawings. (“His face was redder than it had ever been before in his life,” the artist Guy Pène du Bois wrote of himself in the third person.4)
Rockwell, however, treated the subject with curious remove. He later claimed that he and his classmates were so engrossed by the demands of drawing that “we just didn’t think of the model as a woman.” The comment might sound like a prudish feint, so much defensive posturing. But Rockwell probably spoke with some truth, if not for his classmates, then for himself. He found it more interesting to draw a model named Antonio Corsi, who was known to have posed for Sargent and Whistler. (“His dark-skinned body was lithe, strong, and supple—wonderful to draw,” Rockwell recalled.5) Tense as he was about the female body, he was less guarded about acknowledging the beauty of the male body.
George Bridgman’s drawing class at the Art Students League in the fall of 1912 (Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York)
In the end, what Rockwell took away from Bridgman probably had less to do with the human figure and the bones running through it than the romance of his chosen field. Bridgman, the least snobby of aesthetes, revered the heroes of the Golden Age of Illustration. After class was over, he would linger and talk to a few students and never seemed to be in a rush to ride the train home up to Pelham. He would reminisce about Howard Pyle and Edwin Austin Abbey while sipping on a beer and sketching distractedly on a scrap of paper.
Rockwell wanted to believe that illustration was a noble calling. And in Bridgman’s company he did believe it, believed that illustrators were the equal of fine artists. True, they committed the mercenary sin of earning money. But they did something socially valuable and uplifting; they recorded scenes from American history and literary classics. But the Golden Age of Illustration of which they aspired to be part was already nearing extinction. An entire generation seemed to disappear while Rockwell was in school. Frederic Remington, who had immortalized the Wild West in his magazine illustrations, died in 1909 in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Winslow Homer, an undisputed master who had begun his career as a painter-journalist covering the Civil War for Harper’s Weekly, died in his studio in Prouts Neck, Maine, in 1910. John La Farge wrote an obituary for Homer and expired six weeks later in Newport, Rhode Island. The following summer, Edwin Austin Abbey, a native Philadelphian known for his elegant line drawings of scenes culled from Shakespeare, troubadours and the stage, died in London.
But the death that registered the most sharply at the League was surely that of Howard Pyle—Rockwell’s personal favorite. On November 9, 1911, just a month after Rockwell started school, Pyle died suddenly at the age of fifty-eight from a kidney infection. He had been living in a villa outside of Florence, studying mural painting, haunted by a sense that a lifetime’s worth of illustration was not enough to guarantee his place as an artist.
It wasn’t just the loss of prodigiously gifted artists that was draining illustration of its early luster. It was also the rise of advertising. What had begun in America in the late nineteenth century as a cerebral populism—beautiful illustrations in books and literary magazines made possible by advances in photomechanical reproduction—by now had devolved into an exercise in hard-sell consumerism. Magazines were growing thick with advertisements for bicycles and upright pianos, for Knox Gelatine and Pears’ soap. Illustrators who had dreamed in their youth of providing elegant etchings for books by Dickens or Shakespeare instead found themselves trying to draw a Swift’s Premium Ham and persuade the public of its tastiness.
As a student, Rockwell resolved to avoid the coarser outskirts of his field. “In art school,” he noted, “the illustration class was just as highly respected as the portrait or landscape classes. Art Young, Charley Kuntz, and I signed our names in blood, swearing never to prostitute our art, never to do advertising jobs, never to make more than fifty dollars a week.”6 He was referring to his illustration class with Thomas Fogarty, which met on weekdays from 8:30 to 12:30. Fogarty was the opposite of Bridgman—neat, tiny, nervous and literal minded, a professional illustrator, the son of Irish immigrants.7 He pointed his students straight to the marketplace. His own pen-and-ink illustrations appeared regularly in books published by Doubleday, Page and other leading houses, and he generously shared his contacts with his students, encouraging them to search out assignments for themselves and start building relationships with art editors and book publishers.
In class, he trumpeted one message: pictures are the servants of text. He gave his students hypothetical magazine assignments. They read short stories and poetry and picked out lines or verses to illustrate, preferably ones that exuded a bit of drama, that portrayed characters who might be dueling or reveling or sobbing into a handkerchief. The drawings would be judged and graded as much for their artistry as for their fidelity to the text. The goal was to italicize the narrative, to banish vagueness from the words and bring characters into sharp relief.
All in all, Rockwell’s first year at the League was an indisputable success. In May 1912 the school held a big exhibition and gave out prizes. Rockwell won the Thomas Fogarty Illustration Class Award, and his name was mentioned in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and The New York Times.8 His winning submission was an illustration for “The Deserted Village,” the eighteenth-century pastoral poem by Oliver Goldsmith. It remains Rockwell’s earliest known surviving work. The Art Students League kept it for its own modest collection when it awarded him the prize, and thus it was spared the fate of innumerable early Rockwells that were lost or destroyed over time.
This charcoal drawing remains Rockwell’s earliest known work. He intended it as an illustration of a scene in Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Deserted Village.” (Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York)
Rockwell was seventeen years old when he made the drawing, and it is a marvel of precocious draftsmanship. It takes you into a small, tenebrous, candlelit room where a sick boy lies supine in bed, a sheet pulled up to his chin, the contours of his body visible through the fabric. A village preacher, shown from the back in his long coat and white wig, kneels at the boy’s side. A grandfather clock looms dramatically in the center of the composition, infusing the scene with a time-is-ticking ominousness; a chair in the right foreground invites you to linger and look. Perhaps taking a cue from Rembrandt, Rockwell is able to extract great pictorial drama from the play of candlelight on the back wall of the room, a glimpse of radiance in the unreachable distance.
Although Rockwell had been taught that pictures are the “servant of text,” here he breaks that rule. His illustration for “The Deserted Village” has less to do with Goldsmith’s vision than his own. Traditionally, illustrations accompanying “The Deserted Village” have emphasized the theme of exodus
, portraying men and women driven out of an idyllic, tree-laden English landscape. But Rockwell moved his scene indoors and chose to capture a moment of tenderness between an older man and a young man, even though no such scene is described in the poem.
Two lines from “The Deserted Village” are inscribed along the bottom of Rockwell’s drawing: “But in his duty prompt at every call / He watched, he wept, he prayed and felt for all.” The words refer to a preacher in the poem but can serve as a job description of the artistic calling as well.
* * *
Rockwell’s family life, in the meantime, had become a bit sadder and unanchored. His mother, who was now in her midforties, felt overmatched caring for her family as well as for her father-in-law, John, the coal dealer from Yonkers, who was still living with the Rockwells. Nancy Rockwell claimed she could no longer keep house and was tired and miserable all the time; her husband was sympathetic. Early in 1912, six years after they had left New York City and moved to Mamaroneck, the Rockwell family moved back to New York.9 Their new residence was Mrs. Frothingham’s boardinghouse, which occupied two adjacent brownstones on the Upper West Side and offered furnished rooms and three meals a day.
Although living in the city freed Rockwell of his hour-long commute to Mamaroneck, he took a dim view of his new lodgings. In the evenings, when his classmates at the League might go out for a drink, Rockwell would return to Mrs. Frothingham’s, where dinner was served punctually at 6:30 in the cellar dining room. He and his brother and their parents had a table of their own, a corner affair where they said grace and talked among themselves over plates of knockwurst and mashed potatoes and canned fruit for dessert.
Here he was, a young artist living not in Greenwich Village or the Latin Quarter, but in a boarding house among his parents and a dozen or so middle-aged lodgers of whom he was not exactly enamored. They included the “pitiful Misses Palmers,” two sharp-boned spinster sisters who shared a little room on the second floor and had jobs selling lingerie at B. Altman’s. Whenever he left his room, it seemed, they would poke their heads out the door and implore, “Oh, Mr. Rockwell, please stop by for a cup of chocolate.” He would decline politely, explaining that he had a pressing deadline.10
He was no more fond of Mr. Leffingwell, “the star boarder,” deserted by his wife, loudly expounding on his political views, or Dr. Boston, a white-bearded Scotsman who had an unsightly spot on the back of his head where hair refused to grow. In his autobiography, Rockwell was so indiscreet about the Palmer sisters and Mr. Leffingwell and Dr. Boston that his lawyer, who was shown an early draft, suggested he change the names of the boarders and delete certain comments about drinking binges and other unsavory habits. He obliged and the boarders in his autobiography remain pseudonymous.11
Adding to his frustration was the lack of privacy in the boardinghouse. He shared his bedroom with his brother Jarvis, whose shelves were jammed with trophies and mitts and all sorts of sports paraphernalia. Norman felt like he did not have enough room for his desk, which he used as his drawing board and also to store his art supplies. He could scarcely turn around once he opened his folding easel in the corner of his room.
When summer came, Rockwell arranged to study for a few weeks in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with Charles Hawthorne, a disciple of the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase, whose school Rockwell had attended in his youth. Hawthorne, too, had his own school, the now-historic Cape Cod School of Art. Rockwell heard about it from classmates at the League, who had made it sound impossibly idyllic, this casual academy where you lived and painted and had your crits given out of doors, on Saturdays, within view of the harbor.
Renting a room in Provincetown, Rockwell was glad to be out of New York that summer, extricated from his social encounters with the loquacious Palmer sisters and the rest. In Cape Cod, he befriended the other art students in his rooming house, including a young woman from Chicago named Frances Starr. In the afternoons, they would walk to the seaward side of the Cape and swim in the breakers and sometimes lie around the sand for hours. “Evening we’d sit in the kitchen of the boardinghouse and stretch canvases,” he later recalled.12 Then eighteen years old, Rockwell was finally free from the constraining gaze of his parents, living on his own. But as much as he liked Frances, he had no interest in pushing the relationship beyond the platonic. “I never tried to kiss her,” he later noted. “I didn’t even hold her hand. Somehow I felt that would ruin things.”13
He never did cotton to his teacher, Mr. Hawthorne, as the students called him. His philosophy of art drew heavily on French Impressionism, with all that implies about painting without preparatory sketches. In addition to drawing from the model, who was usually a Portuguese fisherman, he required his students to traipse through Provincetown in search of stimulating motifs. It could be anything: a sailboat, the facade of a squat cottage, children picking up shells. He wanted them to work quickly from direct observation, without revising, to be trained in the technique of premier coup, to relish the immediacy of a brushstroke and see how each mark commits you to a certain range of options, narrows your path. He urged them not to make “pictures” but rather to focus on their process, to lay down brushstrokes as if each one represented its own event.
The technique did not appeal to Rockwell and by temperament he was too nervous to embrace an aesthetic of spontaneity. He was less interested in the premier coup than the second coup and the third coup and the ten thousandth coup, in painting and repainting the human figure until his initial marks were buried beneath a blizzard of revisions and something interesting had emerged. Oil paint, in its own way, was a forgiving medium because you could always repaint what you had done the day before. For this reason, he did not like working in watercolor, which left too many visible tracks.
When the summer ended, Rockwell promised his friends he would return to Provincetown the following summer. Perhaps he meant it at the time, thinking of the free, open-ended and interesting life he had discovered with his artist friends. But in the end, it was not freedom from routine that he sought. It was the chance to advance in the world, and he would not return to Provincetown.
FOUR
THE BOY SCOUTS VERSUS THE ARMORY SHOW
(SEPTEMBER 1912 TO DECEMBER 1913)
Rockwell began his second year at the Art Students League as monitor of Bridgman’s class, an honor reserved for the best student. Monitors assisted with teaching demonstrations, in exchange for which their tuition was waived. At the end of class, Bridgman would hand Rockwell a “model”—an actual human skeleton—and ask that he put it away, which could be unnerving. It was kept in a locker, and Rockwell usually had to make a few attempts to hang the skeleton by its hook and close the locker door without having the limbs fly out. He prayed he wouldn’t crush a humerus or an ulna or some other precious bone in the process.
As a budding artist, Rockwell had no particular allegiance to the League. On October 28, he also enrolled in a life-drawing class across town, at the National Academy of Art, where he had taken classes in high school and which did not charge tuition.1 But most of his time was spent away from classrooms, trying to secure paying assignments. He had been an art student for all of one year and already felt eager to be done with it, eager for the future to come. He relied, for contacts, on a list of names from Thomas Fogarty, which got him only so far. New York was the center of the book trade, but appointments with art directors were not easily arranged. Rockwell had to be persistent. He had to climb the steep stairways of brownstones in Greenwich Village, wander hallways, knock politely, hope someone would agree to see him for a minute or two and look at his portfolio of sample illustrations. Although Rockwell was not dashing, he dressed neatly and had a nice personal manner. He said hello in a resonant baritone and shook hands firmly, with the deliberateness of a shy man who was looking for something to hold onto.
His business card left no doubt that he was eager. In the center of the card, in bold capitals, was NORMAN P. ROCKWELL. Then running down the left
side he listed his multitiered occupation: “Artist, Illustrator, Letterer, Cartoonist, sign painting, Christmas cards, calendars, magazine covers, frontispieces, still lifes, murals, portraits, layouts, design, etc.”
He was routinely rejected before he even applied. Pretty secretaries seated behind wooden desks would look up at him, a scrawny teenager and, their eyes brimming with regret, inform him that Mr. X was not available to see him. Sorry, Mr. Y was tied up in a meeting. Mr. Z was vacationing upstate.
New York, the city of a million doors, was also the capital of the closed door. But Rockwell was willing to endure a hundred “nos” for the chance of hearing one “Yes, Mr. Rockwell” and was forever plotting new ways to be seen.
During his first year of school, Rockwell had visited the American Book Company, a textbook publisher with offices on Washington Square. Early one morning, he persuaded a janitor to let him into the anteroom outside the art director’s office. For the next few days, he returned to the same spot and tried to talk to the art director, who would zip past him, appearing annoyed. One day, the art director said with exasperation, “If I give you a job will you permit me to digest my breakfast in peace?”2
And so he received what would be his first-ever published assignment: a set of illustrations for Fanny Eliza Coe’s earnest history book, Founders of Our Country (1912). Rockwell was asked to illustrate the chapter on the explorer Samuel de Champlain and for this he produced five black-and-white, pencil-and-wash scenes.3 After he sent them in to the art director, one came back with scathing criticism and instructions to redo it. He immediately saw the problem. Although he had portrayed Champlain standing on the high rocks of Quebec, pointing to ships gliding down the river, the river was on the same level as his feet! Rockwell wondered how he could have done this. After that, he never let an illustration leave his studio until he had checked and rechecked it innumerable times.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 6
