* * *
When an artist paints his own portrait, he is likely to hang a mirror next to his easel and pause every so often to study his reflection. This accounts for the sharp side glance endemic to the genre of self-portraiture. But how does an artist paint himself from the back with any anatomical rightness? Rockwell’s secret was revealed in an article that appeared in the local paper in October 1938, in connection with his self-portrait: “Dick Birch photographed the illustrator, who worked from the photo.”21 Birch was a struggling Broadway actor who lived in an apartment in New Rochelle and took photographs on the side.
Blank Canvas, 1938 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
It was not the first time Rockwell had worked from photographs. They could be useful as a visual reference, especially if you were trying to draw a chicken or a mutt, or a boy not inclined to hold still. But only now, in 1938, did he publicly acknowledge his use of photographs, perhaps because Life magazine had made them a mark of journalistic sophistication.
At the Post, Wes Stout was bringing in a younger generation of illustrators who considered photographs crucial to their craft. Their work was distinguished by vertiginous angles—high-angle views, low-angle views, everything but eye-level views. You would think modernism had been achieved by the simple act of tilting a camera.
Rockwell thought of the younger illustrators as “the invasion from the Middle West,”22 referring to Al Parker, Stevan Dohanos, Emmet Clarke, and John Falter. Falter was the wunderkind of the group.23 A Nebraska native, he was known for his “pulled-back” panoramas, which means that instead of showing figures in close-up (as Rockwell did), he typically rendered sweeping views in which the figures seemed like an afterthought. After coming east to study art, he and his friends rented a studio in New Rochelle. They thought of it as Rockwell’s town and the unrivaled capital of magazine illustration.
Rockwell could see the advantages of working with photographs and felt compelled to experiment. “Now I am painting every other picture with the help of photographs,” he wrote in a letter in March 1939.24 “The younger generation of illustrators (damn ’em) are all drawing from photographs but I can’t get over the feeling it is cheating.” He did not operate the camera himself. He preferred to have professional photographers take his reference photographs for him, which left him free to direct a scene.
The previous summer, he was mortified when Joe Leyendecker dropped by his studio and glanced at the floor. Hundreds of photographs were scattered about. They talked for an hour that day, with unrelieved awkwardness, both of them conscious of the other’s effort to keep his gaze level and refrain from noticing the pictures on the floor. “Neither one of us appeared to notice them,” Rockwell noted, “but it was just as though a fresh corpse I had just murdered lay there.”25
Rockwell was hardly the first realist painter to suffer pangs of camera guilt. The history of shame over using photographs is almost as long as the history of the use of photographs by painters. Art-historical scholarship of the past generation, as everyone knows, has unveiled the use of photographs by all kinds of master realists who were loath to acknowledge their dependency. In 2001 the British artist David Hockney caused an uproar with his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, which accuses artists of having used cameras and the optical devices that preceded them (namely, lenses) for some four hundred years.
Granted, the notion that Jan Vermeer had used a camera obscura in seventeenth-century Delft to create his scenes of solitary women in crystalline rooms was already widely accepted by scholars. But Hockney pushed the argument back in time. The development of realism, he argued, paralleled breakthroughs in lens making, starting in 1420. “From that moment,” he told an interviewer, “you never see a badly drawn basket again in Western art. They are suddenly all perfectly woven, in perfect perspective.”26
When Rockwell began using photographs, he still needed to go through the elaborate steps with which he had always begun a painting. He still needed to isolate himself in a room to generate an idea for a picture, to think of a lamppost and boys, to rough out his idea on a small sheet of paper and show his sketch to an art editor, to get approval. He still needed to locate models, to rent or buy costumes and track down the right props, to scout out locations, to stand in front of his chosen model and raise his eyebrows sky-high to simulate an expression of surprise, or drop his head weightily in his hands and look sad, to do his acting bit and convey the expressions and poses he wanted.
He could be the most finicky director. Richard Gregory, who posed for the illustrations for Tom Sawyer, recalled an afternoon in 1936 when he and Rockwell headed into the backyard. “He had all these guys there and all this equipment,” Gregory noted. The yard was set up for a photo shoot, but Rockwell abruptly cancelled it. “Forget it,” he said. “The sky isn’t right.”27
When Rockwell drew from a photograph, the process was scarcely one of simple mechanical transcription. He once said he used an average of one hundred photographs for a single Post cover, and they raised problems and complications of their own. His technique required that he combine and recombine parts of dozens of photographs to come up with an image that had never existed in a photograph. Over the years, people who prided themselves on having posed for a particular Rockwell painting often expressed surprise and disbelief upon learning of the existence of strangers who claimed to have posed for the very same painting. He used them all, a blond head from one photograph, a pair of skinny legs from another, assembling disparate parts into bodies and scenes that do not correspond to reality.
In the end, the use of photographs allowed Rockwell to become more himself as a painter, more persuasive as a storyteller. The paradox is that photographs served his instinct for fiction. The advent of Life magazine, which could have crushed him, encouraged him to make his Post covers more realistic and less cartoony. This was a positive development. It helped spawn the mature phase of his work, in which he was able to express his interior visions with a level of preciseness that made his painted world all the more compelling.
FOURTEEN
ARLINGTON, VERMONT
(NOVEMBER 1938 TO SUMMER 1942)
In the fall of 1938 Rockwell and Mary decided to buy a summer house in southern Vermont. Rockwell knew about the village of Arlington from his friends Fred Hildebrandt and Mead Schaeffer, who fished there every spring. It was on the Batten Kill River, which wound down from the Green Mountains and was said to be the best trout stream in Vermont. “Fred Hildebrandt got everyone to Vermont,” Schaeffer later recalled, “but I talked Norman into staying in Vermont.”1
Burt Immen, a local realtor, showed the Rockwells a farm in West Arlington—the old Parson’s House, as the locals referred to it, a modest farmhouse set on sixty acres of meadow and apple orchard. It sat amid mountains, the Green Mountains and the Red Mountain, on land that ran along the western bank of the Batten Kill River. That was key: the Batten Kill, which flowed right through the property, the clear water rushing over rocks, gurgling loudly. Rockwell bought the house that day—November 9, 1938—for $2,500. There were two red barns a few hundred feet from the house, toward the bottom of the broad sloping lawn, and he arranged to have the smaller one remodeled into a studio.
Winter passed, and soon it was May 1939. Rockwell and Mary and the boys were living in their farmhouse, which, from the outside, looked better than they had remembered, a rectangle of white glowing against the green hillside. The front lawn ran down to the river. The Rockwell boys were now eleven, nine, and six years old, and their new swimming hole was “about three times bigger than we expected it to be,” as Mary Rockwell wrote in a letter. An ancient rowboat was docked in the yard and the children learned to row the first day.
As isolated as Arlington was, Rockwell had in fact brought a small entourage of friends with him. That June, Mead Schaeffer and his wife, Elizabeth, purchased their own farmhouse in Arlington.2 Located at the end of Sandgate Road, it wasn’t
habitable year-round, at least not yet, but here they were for the summer: Mead and his wife and their two lovely daughters, who were a little bit older than the Rockwell boys, almost teenagers.
Fred Hildebrandt visited for much of July and he amused Rockwell’s young sons with his daredevil stunts, like climbing up to a barn rooftop and walking along the ridgepole.3 He surfaces in Mary’s correspondence as someone whose presence she had come to enjoy. He brought in the mail, helped with errands, and, above all, coaxed Rockwell out of his studio. One Sunday, Hildebrandt, along with Rockwell and Mary and their two older sons, squeezed into the rowboat and traveled two miles downriver, over rapids, stopping for a picnic dinner.4 “You would have died,” Mary wrote to her sister on July 10, “if you could have seen us five in that little leaky boat with sides about three inches above the water! But I never had more fun.”5
Rockwell, his friends insisted, did not have a deep connection to nature. He didn’t plant flowers or put down down a vegetable patch. And he didn’t make the Vermont countryside a subject of his work. Unlike his fellow illustrators in Arlington, who turned out magazine covers that abounded with deer, pine trees, and autumn leaves, Rockwell declined to paint a landscape in the fourteen years he lived in Vermont. Hildebrandt recalled an occasion when he and Rockwell were out fishing and someone remarked on a commanding view in the distance. “Yes, isn’t it beautiful?” replied Rockwell. “Thank heavens I don’t have to paint it!”6
His friends were aware that he did not get a house in Vermont because he wanted to paint scenes of nature. Rather, he wanted to experience small-town life, to counter a feeling of staleness in his work, to work with new models. Models who were not models, just ordinary people devoid of pretense. He was a painter of human faces, of figures in space.
True, there was one outdoor activity he liked in Vermont. He often went for long walks in the mountains that rose steeply behind his house. He would climb through the apple orchards and then into the woods, a lean silhouette with a walking stick, trailed by his dog. Walking uphill appealed to the part of him that valued discipline. Most people go uphill to enjoy the reward and release of going down, but Rockwell preferred the uphill part, the exertion it required.
His walks were made even more arduous by shoes that pinched his toes. Mary once commented: “He buys his shoes too small.”7 Interesting. A dissertation could be written on the subject of Rockwell and shoes. He squeezed his feet into tight shoes, as if trying to keep the dirtier parts of himself constrained. As mentioned, he could not shine his shoes enough, even on fishing trips. Yet in his art he painted footwear without inhibition. The novelist John Updike once observed that Rockwell had “a surreally expressive vocabulary of shoes.”8 He was attentive not only to different styles, but to the signs of wear they acquired over time (and in those days, Americans kept their shoes for a longer time than they do now, repairing and resoling them rather than throwing them out). Rockwell painted brown leather loafers that could use a coat of polish. He painted boots with frayed laces. He painted red Keds with scuff marks on the white trim, and penny loafers whose permanently upturned toes have been molded over time by the particular gait of the owner. What they have in common is that they look comfortable. They are sensible shoes, the sort that allow toes to expand. They are precisely what his own shoes were not.
* * *
The first painting he completed in Vermont, Marble Champion, graced the cover of the Post on September 2, 1939. A redheaded girl of perhaps eleven or twelve kneels on the ground and prepares to pitch a gray marble, her face tense with concentration. Two schoolboys peering over her shoulder look a little worried, not least because by 1939 girls had begun to receive acknowledgment in citywide marbles tournaments. Rockwell’s detractors accuse him of catering to the stereotypes of a mass market, but in fact he helped topple stereotypes. His marble-shooting girl, with her pigtails and worn leather shoes, is not some delicate sugar-spun creature, but a toughie, a reflection of his sense of women as forceful competitors.
Marble Champion represented a break from Rockwell’s magazine covers of the previous decade. Once he acquired his house in Vermont, he shifted away from his Colonial obsessions, from Yankee Doodle and Ye Olde Sign Painters, from patriots with their wigs and ruffled shirts and buckled shoes. Instead of burrowing into American history, which he had done for about a decade, he now favored contemporary (albeit invented) scenes featuring people who lived in a New England town, his town. It was the Our Town view of America, and it seems likely that Thornton Wilder’s play helped him forge a way forward in his work by reminding him of the drama and meaning that inheres in everyday life.
Wilder’s masterpiece, Our Town, had opened on Broadway in February 1938 and won a Pulitzer Prize that spring. It is set in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, the most famous nonexistent village in New England. Staged without scenery and with the curtain always up, it relates the stories of Emily Webb and George Gibbs and life among such staple characters as a milkman, a town doctor, and a newspaper editor. It prompted an inundation of articles about the virtues of New Englanders, who, purportedly, were understated and self-sufficient, who stoically accepted their freezing winters.
Wilder, who was three years younger than Rockwell, had little in common with the characters in Our Town. Born in Wisconsin, he was reared in China and spent a good amount of time in Hollywood. He lived for many years with his unwed sister, on Deepwood Drive in Hamden, Connecticut, and enjoyed close friendships with younger men.
Rockwell, too—he did not resemble the characters who inhabit his paintings. Like Wilder, whom he knew in later life as a casual acquaintance, Rockwell created a body of work that says something about an odd-duck artist yearning for normalcy and community. He began identifying himself, starting now, as a man who lived in Vermont, a New Englander just like his neighbors, although he invariably made his point in the nasal and accented voice of a Noo Yawker.
What does it mean to be a New Englander? In contrast to the characters who would proliferate in his paintings—people who live in towns where time passes slowly and idle away afternoons playing checkers—Rockwell didn’t have ten seconds to spare. Not the most typical Vermonter, he drank Coca-Cola for breakfast and declined to swim in the Batten Kill River flowing through his front yard, insisting that the water was too cold.
* * *
When September came, the summer people dispersed. Rockwell and Mary decided to stay in Vermont through the fall. They left the radio on all the time to follow the urgent bulletins out of Europe. Poland was burning to the ground and Britain finally declared war on Germany. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain broke the news (“You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggles to win peace have failed”) in a voice that sounded unnaturally calm.
That September, Rockwell and Mary enrolled their sons in public school, a quaint one-room schoolhouse on the West Arlington Green. It had “two grades totaling forty-eight children in one room,” as Mary noted. Rockwell agreed to be a guest lecturer at a monthly PTA meeting. It was held on a Thursday evening in October. He delivered his talk perched casually on the top of a desk, with one knee clasped in his hands. “I’m not a public speaker,” he began, with the charm and adroitness of a born public speaker.9
Mary was glad to be away from New Rochelle, where her neighbors, she felt, were “not interesting.” In Arlington everyone was new and she couldn’t believe how nice the people seemed. Although the Rockwells did not join a church, Mary became a member of the guild of the St. James’ Episcopal Church. In September she was elected to the board of the Martha Canfield Library and over time she would help expand the children’s section. In photographs from the period, she wears skirts that fall below her knees, ankle socks, saddle shoes, and large glasses. She could pass for a librarian.
For a small town of only fourteen hundred residents, Arlington had a sizable creative population. “There are lots of artists and writers up here but they are all serious people and not at all the Greenwic
h Village type,” Rockwell wrote approvingly on October 11, 1939. He mentioned Mead Schaeffer, “one of my best friends.” Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a novelist and critic, “is the patron saint of the village, and her vigilance has kept the town as simple and lovely as it is. It is not a tourist or summer place, but a genuine American New England town.”
His comments were made in a letter to Clyde Forsythe, on stationery engraved with his wife’s name. “I’ve been doing much better up here in Vermont,” Rockwell continued. “It is getting colder up here but we love it so much we just can’t leave until we are frozen out. The kids are going to school here and look like real country-folk.”10
Two days later, the local newspaper announced that Rockwell was a “permanent resident” of Arlington.11 But that depends on what you mean by the word permanent. By the end of October, Rockwell and Mary had decided to pull their sons out of school and return to New Rochelle for the winter, largely because their new house had no source of heat besides two wood-burning Franklin stoves. Throughout that winter, he and Schaeffer would drive up to Arlington about once a month to supervise the renovation of their homes. They stayed with Miss Sadie F. Hard, a sixtyish spinster who owned a cozy boardinghouse on Main Street and was famed locally for her recipes, most of which called for one cup or more of Vermont maple syrup.
* * *
Rockwell had no difficulty finding friends who were inordinately devoted to him. He had the pull of celebrity, and people were flattered when he asked for their help. “I never had a friend I loved more,” Schaeffer later commented. He was four years younger than Rockwell, a trim adventurer with blue eyes and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. Although relatively unknown today, he was once prominent as a book illustrator. Much as Charles Scribner’s Sons had enlisted the formidable N. C. Wyeth to illustrate the classics it published, Dodd, Mead & Company initiated a similar series with Schaeffer doing most of the titles, starting with Moby-Dick in 1922. His illustrations, Rockwell once noted with admiration, “gave one a real sense of robust, swashbuckling manhood.”
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 21
