American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  Rockwell arrived in New Rochelle just in time to participate in a show that was quite prestigious—the first annual juried exhibition of the New Rochelle Art Association. It opened in May 1914 in the fine arts room at the brand-new New Rochelle Public Library, a handsome pale-brick structure that owed its existence to a grant from Andrew Carnegie. At age twenty, Rockwell was the youngest artist in the show.1 He exhibited two works, which were identified on a checklist, rather unhelpfully, as “Illustration” and “Sketch.” He was still Norman P. Rockwell, an artist who used his middle initial when he signed his name. Rockwell’s coexhibitors at the library were an illustrious (and initial-heavy) bunch, including Frederic S. Remington, who by then had died; J. C. Leyendecker; Frank X. Leyendecker; and C. Coles Phillips.

  Of all the artists in New Rochelle, Rockwell was the most taken with Joseph Leyendecker (pronounced LINE-decker), the star cover artist for The Saturday Evening Post. Today he is remembered as the creator of the Arrow Collar Man, a handsome, square-jawed figure and the first preppy in American advertising. But in his time, Leyendecker was beloved for his Post covers. A German immigrant and master draftsman, he used a crisp, spiky Northern European line to portray scenes of American life, many of them tied to national holidays. His covers might show a New Year’s baby bestriding a globe, a pilgrim hunting a Thanksgiving turkey, or elves pummeling Santa with snowballs.

  In contrast to most other illustrators, who specialized in pretty-girl covers, Leyendecker favored genre scenes. “Girls’ heads are being overdone,” he said in a rare interview that appeared in The Sun in 1913.2 “The simple reason is that composition involves difficulties which many illustrators prefer to avoid. In painting a girl’s head, they have only one problem to face: to make it as beautiful as possible. In drawing pictures that require composition, it is necessary to practice control and eliminate everything that is superfluous.”

  In dismissing the fashion for girls’ heads, Leyendecker was presumably dismissing his fellow illustrators at The Saturday Evening Post. So many covers from that period show bust-length portraits of women with powder-white skin and beet-red color on their cheeks. They peer out from beneath the wide, tilted brims of fashionable hats. Their gaze tends to be dramatic, perhaps in emulation of the new silent film stars. If they are engaged in an activity, it is likely to be one that requires little in the way of physical exertion, such as admiring a dove or a parakeet.

  But perhaps the fashion for “girls’ heads,” as Leyendecker called them, was winding down. “People are now demanding pictures that have some larger meaning,” he insisted, “illustrations with an idea behind them and humor whenever possible.”

  Both Leyendecker and his artist-brother Frank X. Leyendecker were homosexual and, to shield themselves from discrimination, concealed their sexual identity not only from their readers but from their editors as well. They lived with their father and their sister, Augusta, in a Renaissance-style chateau they had just built on Mt. Tom Road, on the southern edge of New Rochelle. Rockwell often wondered about the lives unfolding behind the iron fence that rimmed their estate. Walking along Mt. Tom Road on evening strolls with his parents, he would pause in front of the house and glance up at the lighted windows, where a figure might slip into view.

  Rockwell worshiped Leyendecker’s covers and considered him the single best illustrator in the country. He shared with Leyendecker a love of narrative illustration, as well as an impatience with girls’ heads. But several years would pass before Rockwell befriended Leyendecker. For now he simply watched him from afar. In the morning, walking to his studio, he sometimes noticed the brothers at the New Rochelle train station, on the way to their studios in New York City. There they were, Joe and Frank, emerging from their limousine or standing on the platform in their matching blue blazers and white flannel slacks.

  * * *

  As much as Leyendecker, the other illustrators who lived in New Rochelle owed their prosperity to the “slicks,” as the new general interest magazines were known. They included Orson Lowell, Edward Penfield (the father of the American poster), and Fred Dana Marsh (the father of the social-realist painter Reginald Marsh). With his tripartite name, Marsh was sometimes confused with Charles Dana Gibson, who was the most famous of all. Gibson was the creator of the ubiquitous Gibson Girl, that fashionable belle with pointy breasts and an hourglass waistline and a tremendous amount of long, wavy hair that is usually pinned up in what was called a pompadour; it can put you in mind of a robin’s nest or swirls of soft ice cream. In her heyday, she was viewed as an icon of female independence, a woman willing to express an opinion or have a drink without parental consent.

  The illustrator Charles Dana Gibson specialized in images of busty women with big hair.

  Coles Phillips created another female icon: the Fade-Away Girl, a tall figure with shapely legs who derives her singularity from sophisticated visual tricks. Swatches of her dress are cut away, exposing the background of the composition, which in turn becomes an integral part of the dress. Your eye fills in the presumed outlines. The effect is striking, and turns every housewife into a Houdini equipped with the ability to appear, disappear, and reappear in the clean, rectangular space of a magazine cover.

  Compared to his fellow illustrators in New Rochelle, symbols of success who lived in Tudor mansions overlooking the Long Island Sound or rolling woodlands in the Wykagyl neighborhood north of downtown, Rockwell lived modestly. He did not own a tract of land. He did not employ servants. Rather, he was still residing with his penny-scrimping parents and his brother, Jarvis, at Brown Lodge, in the city’s business district.

  On weekday mornings, Rockwell’s father and brother commuted by train into New York City, to their respective jobs in Lower Manhattan. Rockwell did not have to venture that far. He could walk from Brown Lodge to the studio he rented at 78 North Avenue. He usually started his work day by drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola, which helped him wake up, and mulling over the painting in progress on his easel. He would try to figure out which part of it didn’t work and he always found something. This provided him with an entry point back into the painting and opened up a space of concentration into which he could disappear for hours.

  He was separated from the other illustrators in New Rochelle not only by his youth and his inexperience, but by his lack of interest in their notion of glamour, their sense of the things that make life worthwhile. For starters, he did not care for golf and could not understand how certain men played round after round at the Wykagyl Country Club. Most of them were married and their wives and girlfriends were themselves somewhat celebrated and ogled—they were the women who had modeled for the Gibson Girl and the Fade-Away Girl and all the other new kinds of modern girls.

  Rockwell, by contrast, continued to work seven days a week and to produce illustrations of boys. Skating boys and brawling boys and boys sitting around the proverbial campfire. He had already drawn more baseball diamonds than he could count. Ditto for shipwrecks and deserted islands. In the two years since he had left the Art Students League, he had come to know the art editors at various magazines and secured a steady influx of assignments. His work for Boys’ Life led to assignments from other children’s magazines, such as St. Nicholas and The Youth’s Companion, and though the magazines were competing for junior subscribers, no one stopped Rockwell from publishing his work in all of them.

  The now-forgotten Youth’s Companion, a weekly priced at seven cents an issue, had the largest circulation of the children’s magazines. It was published in Boston, by Perry Mason & Co. (from which the television attorney derived his name). St. Nicholas, by contrast, a New York–based monthly priced at a relatively steep twenty-five cents, continues to be called the best children’s magazine ever. Published by Century Company, it was the little person’s version of The Century Magazine, a mix of literature and beautifully drawn illustrations in which Rockwell along with the rest of his generation gained his first excited glimpse of pictures by Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish.
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br />   The Magic Football (“I thought you were wrong”) ran as a story illustration in St. Nicholas, the best of the children’s magazines, in December 1914. The medium is oil on canvas en grisaille.

  Rockwell was pleased when he was given a full page in the Christmas 1914 issue of St. Nicholas magazine.3 His illustration, which accompanied a story called “The Magic Football,” shows a boy of perhaps twelve or thirteen perched on the edge of a Windsor chair, mesmerized by the appearance of a male fairy with pointy ears, a long nose, and a tall black hat floating a few feet above his head. Sunlight pours into the study from a window on the left and fades as it moves across the room, touching the boy’s face and the arms of his chair. The picture is astonishingly precocious. Departing from the text of the story he was purportedly illustrating, Rockwell furnishes the room with the trappings of a cultured life—there are leather-bound books arrayed above the mantelpiece, as well as framed reproductions of museum paintings, including a Rembrandt self-portrait and Jean-François Millet’s Gleaners. What’s interesting is how Rockwell takes an assignment for a commercial magazine and bends it to accommodate his own artistic preoccupations. Everything is here—his love of Millet and Rembrandt, his clarity, books, a boy, a magic hat. A story can be an opportunity for self-expression, even if the story was written by someone else.

  * * *

  In addition to its illustrators, New Rochelle also had an impressive population of cartoonists. They included Frederick Opper, Clare Briggs, and Clyde Forsythe, all of whom had gained a new visibility as a result of the circulation fight pitting Joseph Pulitzer’s World against William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Like a character in a cartoon strip of his own devising, Hearst was constantly scheming to lure cartoonists away from The World. It was the age of “yellow journalism,” a phrase that originated from the popular Yellow Kid strip that for a while appeared—in competing versions—in both the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers.

  Rockwell, who had drawn caricatures in his childhood and had a natural gift for comic anecdote, was well aware of the artistic possibilities of the Sunday funnies. He recognized that comic strips were not just a series of laugh-out-loud jokes; they represented a morally coherent universe. In what is probably his most-quoted statement about his art, Rockwell wrote in his autobiography: “Maybe as I grew up and found that the world wasn’t the perfectly pleasant place I had thought it to be I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and so painted only the ideal aspects of it—pictures in which there were no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers, in which, on the contrary, there were only Foxy Grandpas who played baseball with kids.”4

  Self-centered mothers? He certainly described his own that way. Foxy Grandpas? Rockwell was presumably referring to Carl Schultze’s Foxy Grandpa, one of the early classics of the Sunday funnies. It first appeared in The New York Herald in 1900, when he was six years old; its protagonist was a clever old man who, from one day to the next, outsmarts his two pesky grandsons, Chub and Bunt. Unlike other cartoon strips, whose humor derived from subversive acts or emotions—rage, madness, sloppiness, screaming, etc.—Foxy Grandpa offered up a gentler universe in which any threat of chaos was neatly resolved by its elderly hero.

  * * *

  Once he settled in New Rochelle, Rockwell quickly became best friends with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe, who happened to have a studio in the same building as he on North Avenue.5 At lunchtime, Rockwell would walk down the hall to talk to Forsythe, who would regale him with amusing stories. Then he would try to drag Forsythe back to his studio, so he could see what he was working on. Rockwell was always asking people what they thought of a particular painting. He had an enormous need for reassurance and found friends who could bolster him up, who were sufficiently accepting to find his insecurity charming. “Give it time,” Forsythe would tell him. “Hell, Lincoln was fifty-one before he was elected president.”

  Forsythe was quite a bit older than Rockwell, nine years, and already established in his career. His daily strip about boxing, The Great White Dope, ran in Pulitzer’s paper, The Evening World. Soon he would create Joe’s Car, which in turn evolved into Joe Jinks, whose title character was a cartoon Everyman, a balding, agitated, henpecked husband with a passion for cars. The strip paid well, but Forsythe’s ambition was to be a painter of the southwestern desert. Every Christmas, he packed up a few canvases and as many rifles and went out west to work on his landscapes. He disparaged his cartoon work and was constantly threatening to give it up and move back to his native California.

  At five each day, Forsythe would walk home to his house on Elm Street and be greeted by Cotta, his wife. Rockwell stayed in his studio until around six or, in the dead of winter, until daylight gave out, and then returned home to spend the evening with his parents. In the summer of 1915, after a little more than a year of life at Brown Lodge, they moved to a rooming house they considered a bit nicer: Edgewood Hall, at 39 Edgewood Park, near Webster Avenue and the trolley. It was run by a married couple, Fred and Sadie Miller, and advertised as “a quiet family hotel,” with “handsome furnished rooms.”6

  In October, the local paper reported that “Jarvis Rockwell, of Edgewood Hall, was tendered a birthday party by his fellow guests at the hotel.”7 Some of the lodgers, including Jarvis’s girlfriend and future wife, were young women living on their own, but there were also families with school-age children. It was here, at Edgewood Hall, that Rockwell met Billy Payne, a young lodger who would come to play a large role in his work, a handsome, athletic eleven-year-old with reddish-blond hair and a generous smattering of freckles.

  Rockwell was relieved to have found a model as talented as Billy, who soon was dropping by his studio almost every day after school. He didn’t have much family in town. His only sibling was a much-older half sister from his father’s first marriage; she lived in Indiana and saw him infrequently. Rockwell, by contrast, seemed to have unlimited time for Billy, so long as the boy was willing to hold still as Rockwell sketched.

  To be sure, Billy was not the most disciplined model. He could tire of holding expressions and poses, or be overcome with a sudden and irrepressible desire to throw an object across a room. But Rockwell devised a way to help him concentrate. Instead of writing a check at the end of the day—the pay was fifty cents an hour—he piled up a stack of quarters on his work table. Billy received a quarter every thirty minutes, presuming he was still on the modeling stand and not making water balloons at the sink. The method was surprisingly effective and Rockwell used it with repeated success.

  * * *

  In February 1916 Rockwell turned twenty-two and appeared in a three-man show at the New Rochelle Public Library, along with Clyde Forsythe and a young artist named Ernest Albert, Jr. While his coexhibitors were represented by a few dozen landscapes—Forsythe’s entries included such western scenes as Santa Monica Shore, Redondo Cliffs, and Twin Peaks—Rockwell had zero interest in painting pictures devoid of people, which is how he thought of landscape painting. Art without a face. He had fifteen works in the show, a mix of illustrations from St. Nicholas magazine and portraits of acquaintances, including a sensitive portrait of his young friend Billy Payne.

  The show generated a flurry of publicity, at least locally. The New Rochelle Tattler, which, conveniently, was located in an office adjacent to Rockwell’s studio, gave him a full page. It probably helped that Adelaide Klenke, who wrote the piece and edited the Tattler, already knew and liked Rockwell. She was a few years older than he, blond and still single, the daughter of German émigrés, and he found her amusing. He frequently quoted a less than flattering comment she had made about his appearance. She told him he had “the eyes of an angel and the neck of a chicken.”

  In her article for the Tattler, she was not so mocking, describing Rockwell as tall and thin, with a “big, bass drum laugh.”8 Although he had never been west of New Jersey, his comments made him sound like a world traveler. “I intended giving up illustration this winter and
going to Norway for several months and studying the Norwegian and Swedish genre painters,” he announced, “but my contracts interfered and my work piled up.” He added that he hoped to go to Norway in the spring. Perhaps he genuinely wanted to study the work of Adolph Tidemand and other nineteenth-century Norwegian genre painters, or perhaps he was merely letting readers know that he was the sort of man who was capable of taking off without warning.

  Just a few days later, the New Rochelle Pioneer ran a front-page story with the perky headline: NORMAN P. ROCKWELL MAKING A SUCCESS AT ILLUSTRATING.9 The article made no mention of Norway and, to the contrary, emphasized the substantial if unspecified income that Rockwell was earning from magazines. Rockwell, by contrast, claimed to be motivated by something more personal. “I like the boy stuff,” Rockwell told his interviewer. “There is not so much money in it as in adult stuff, but it is more interesting. I do many adventure stories and specialize in the historic.”

  * * *

  On March 1, 1916, Rockwell and Forsythe moved into a studio that had initially belonged to Frederic Remington. His former house, Endion, a so-called Gothic cottage, occupied three acres at 301 Webster Avenue.10 A photograph taken before 1909, the year of his death, shows Remington standing on his front lawn in a derby hat, holding the reins of his horse, the bright winter sun casting long shadows on the grass. Remington had built a sculpture studio on the property, the “shanty,” as he called it, which was made of corrugated iron and was basically a big, generic shed. But the interior was spacious, with a seventeen-foot-high ceiling, and it was here that Rockwell set up his easel and worked for the next year. Forsythe decorated the place with relics of the American West he brought back from California, including cowboy saddles, sagebrush, and cacti. Rockwell did not care for the plants. “Every once in a while you’d go to grab something and you would grab a cactus,” he recalled.11