American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (30 page)

Rockwell immediately turned his attention to a painting called
Blank Canvas
.
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His first (known) self-portrait, it shows him as a painter-goofball trying in vain to generate an idea for a
Post
cover as a deadline looms. He portrays himself from the back, in his studio, a skinny man in a Windsor swivel chair, scratching his bony head in puzzlement. There he sits for the thousandth time, with his paints and his rags and his long maulstick, and there rests his large canvas in all its glaring whiteness. It’s not completely “blank,” as the title suggests. The logo of
The Saturday Evening Post
has been stenciled across the top, cleverly so, an image of a magazine cover framed by an actual magazine cover.

You can tell, even from the back, that the neck of Rockwell’s powder-blue shirt is open wide. The left collar is sticking out and pointing westward, as if it were eager to depart from the studio. Discarded sketches are heaped on a wooden crate that serves as a side table. How does he get ideas? Perhaps by swiping them; art books are propped open to images he has consulted in desperation. Real artists purportedly cull their inspiration from their experience of the world, as opposed to thumbing through a fat volume of readymade images of
DOG CLIPS
, the title of a book whose spine is visible in Rockwell’s wooden crate.

It is interesting that Rockwell was moved to paint his first self-portrait after the ordeal of his wife’s abortion. The painting abounds with covert references to pregnancy, such as “due date” affixed to his easel as well as the little kachina doll tacked to the top, inside a curvy horseshoe-womb. Perhaps the experience in England had made him feel that he, too, was consumed by questions of conception and creative birth. And sometimes he could not deliver.

*   *   *

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.
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“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.