American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (4 page)

Rockwell wondered if he inherited his drawing skill from his grandfather, Howard Hill, creator of
Family of Grouse in a Landscape.

In his later years, when Rockwell was seventy-three and working out of a barn-turned-studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, he was informed that one of his grandfather’s bird paintings (
Game Bird and Family
) was coming up for auction at Parke-Bernet in New York. Although he was not a sentimental person and in fact could be callous with relatives, he called the auction house and then confirmed in a letter: “As you advised, I am willing to make a bid of $250, and more if necessary, because I want to get the picture.” He wound up paying $350.
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Who’s to say why one realist painter lives and dies in unrelieved obscurity while another enjoys the opposite fate—that is, rises out of nowhere to become wealthy and famous and is invited to dine with the president at the White House? This is not a question that Rockwell was likely to contemplate. He was not inclined to look back. He was one of the most efficient artists who ever lived. He never wasted a day. Is it possible to make art without risking failure? He would find a way. This, too, was part of his inheritance from Hill, whose fate alerted him to the hazards of the artistic life.

*   *   *

This story begins in London, on July 16, 1851, a Wednesday. That was the day on which Hill married a young dressmaker. Her name was Ann Patmore and she was the daughter of a servant. She had just turned twenty-two; he was slightly younger. At the time, he was living with his parents at 10 Smith Street, in a dingy brick house in Chelsea. On the marriage certificate, Hill listed himself as “Artist.” His father had to sign the document as well and gave his occupation as “House decorator,” which at the time referred to a tradesman who knew how to hang wallpaper and paint wood.

Painters in London were not a homogenous group. A hierarchy ruled. The ship painter was rated below the house painter, who in turn was rated below the sign painter. The mural painter and easel painters were at the top of the heap. In describing himself as an “artist,” Hill was referring, perhaps, less to his achievements than his plan for the future: he did not intend to wind up painting houses like his father.

In the seven years following their marriage, Howard and Ann remained in Chelsea and three children were born: Susan Ann, Thomas, and Amy Eliza.
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During that time, Hill’s career had its ups and downs, and probably more of the latter. When their first child was baptized, Hill and his wife were living on Jubilee Place and he listed his trade as “decorator,” as if momentarily knocked off his perch. When their second child was baptized, he was back up to to the status of “artist.” And when their third child was born, they did not bother having her baptized, perhaps because they were in the process of packing up their meager possessions and preparing to sail for America, where his parents had already settled.

Leaving England by crowded steerage, Hill—accompanied by Ann and their three young children—sailed from Liverpool and arrived in this country on March 22, 1858. The trip in second cabin took eight days and when they docked at the pier in New York Harbor, they arrived in a city teeming with immigrants. The streets were thronged with horses and wagons and pushcart vendors from whom you could buy a pickle or a cabbage or a live chicken. If you walked uptown on Broadway, the crowds and big buildings dwindled after Fourteenth Street, and the area known as Herald Square was considered the countryside. Up on Fifty-ninth Street, a beautiful park was about to open. It was modeled on a picturesque park in England that Hill knew well, Birkenhead Park, and perhaps he wondered why it had no name, other than “the central park.”

Our first indication of Hill’s whereabouts in America surfaces in the 1860 federal census. He and Ann were living in Yonkers, north of the city, a stretch of verdant dairy farms. Moving into the home of his widowed father, they stayed long enough for a daughter to be born in 1861. Immediately afterward, he moved his family to Hoboken, New Jersey, which was closer to the city, directly across the river from Manhattan, on the west bank of the Hudson. White-painted ferries and steamships glided by all day. Throughout the Civil War, Hill lived in Hoboken, an artist-immigrant gazing out over the river.

He got off to a promising start. He landed a job with Currier & Ives, the famous printmakers, who were based in Manhattan. Neither Nathaniel Currier nor James Merritt Ives was actually an artist. Rather, they were marketing wizards who employed dozens of artists and devised the ingenious idea of advertising their art inventory in attractive catalogs they published themselves. Some of the prints were engraved copies of paintings, but most of them were original images drawn by artists who remained unacknowledged. The prints were run off in black-and-white and then, after drying for a day or so, were finished by low-paid women who sat at long tables with stencils and pots of brightly colored inks.

The shop at 152 Nassau Street advertised itself as a “Grand Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints,” which was actually true. Anyone could drop by and browse through the racks of hand-colored lithographs. The inventory was constantly changing, although certain motifs were nearly sacrosanct, such as rural landscapes with two-story farmhouses and split-rail fences and horses trotting along a dirt road. Many of the prints seem to say, “We’ll all feel better with some fresh country air.” An inexplicably large number portray snow-covered farmhouses, with light playing off the rooftops and ground, as if it were possible to leach the grayness not only out of art, but out of winter as well.

The prints may have been technically awkward or unpolished, but they were usually lively, jammed with lots of informative details. And they were certainly reasonable. Prices, according to the firm’s 1860 catalog, started at eight cents and went up to more than three dollars. Any housewife could afford to buy a lithograph to frame and hang in the parlor.

Moreover, you could have the pleasure of exercising your taste by picking out one from among hundreds, preferably one that expressed “the sincere ideas and tastes of the house and not the tyrannical dicta of some art critic or neighbor,” as Harriet Beecher Stowe put it in her bestselling advice book,
The American Woman’s Home
, in 1869. Her comment remains the only takedown to dismiss art critics and neighbors with equal harshness.

Nothing is viewed as more quintessentially American than Currier & Ives prints, but the irony is that most of the firm’s illustrators were British émigrés. Many good scenes of the Rocky Mountains were produced by Currier & Ives artists who had trained in London and never traveled very far west of the Hudson River.

Hill did not last long at the Currier & Ives shop. Whether he was too mercurial to hold down a job or too self-regarding to submit to the drudgery of copying paintings by other artists, he soon went off on his own. This is the period when he started painting groupings of ducks and quails in scenic landscapes, and it seems likely that he was influenced by James John Audubon’s famous illustrations. It had been a generation since Audubon had published his
Birds of America
, with its hand-colored engravings of every species he could find. Some of Hill’s paintings combine images of Audubon birds with a woodsy landscape setting. Most of his paintings were done on small canvases, about ten by twelve inches, and some are just six by eleven inches. They’re painted in a tight, detail-laden style and when they err, it is on the side of preciousness.

In New York the economy boomed during the Civil War and Hill prospered. He took a studio in Manhattan and was listed in the city directory as “Howard Hill artist 609 Broadway, residence Hoboken.” In 1865, four of his bird paintings were included in the most important survey show of the year—the fortieth Annual Exhibition at the National Academy of Design, which had just moved into a grand new building on East Twenty-third Street. At the time, the Academy was the foremost art school and museum in the city; in fact, it was the only art museum. There was no Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were no public rooms where you could see a Rembrandt or a Vermeer or even minor Dutch masters. The Manhattan art world then consisted of little more than the National Academy and some commercial shops down on Nassau Street where middling paintings were auctioned off like so much old furniture. There were a few art dealers, but their loyalty was to fashionable French artists, such as Adolphe-William Bouguereau, who painted female nudes with silky skin and cherubs fluttering in the sky. American artists were left to dispose of their work at group exhibitions, the most important one being the Academy’s annuals.

On April 27, 1865, less than two weeks after the assassination of President Lincoln, the Academy held an opening reception for its fortieth Annual Exhibition. Despite the recent tragedy, it proved to be a glittery social event. A writer for
Harper’s Weekly
took note of the “gay and flashing groups” of visitors. The women wore gowns; the men were in frocks and silk top hats. They gathered in sumptuous rooms with Persian carpets to look at paintings that were hung salon-style, from floor to ceiling. More than a hundred artists were in the show, all of them at the mercy of the Hanging Committee, as it was called, somewhat ominously. Artists who had prayed to God that their work would be granted a central eye-level spot were likely to have spent opening night wondering why their pictures had been relegated to the hazy margins. Humbler painters, on the other hand, were no doubt thrilled to find themselves in such prestigious company. The speakers that night included William Cullen Bryant, the long-bearded nature poet and newspaper editor, who praised the Academy as an institution that had finally reached its “ripe maturity.”
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So, for one all-too-brief moment, Hill was a man whose career appeared to be ascendant, a British émigré whose life intersected with the brightest stars in American art. Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, and Sanford Gifford were among his coexhibitors at the Academy, and he may have personally met them at the opening reception. Perhaps he shook their hands or even had a chat. Or perhaps he didn’t and was sick with regret when he got home that night.

This was the heyday of landscape painting in America and Bierstadt was the most celebrated of the lot. He painted sweeping views of the American West, scenes of tall cliffs and orange-y sunsets that seemed designed to show space at its most abundant, to insert miles of dewy vapor between you and the mountain peaks.

One of the mysteries of Hill’s career is that he did not endow his pictures with similar grandeur. Although he lived on top of the Hudson River—in Yonkers to the east and then in Hoboken to the west—he never painted a river view. Perhaps he was indifferent to romantic vistas. Perhaps, instead of inspiring him, they intimidated him. Distant views, especially those of mountains, diminish the observer to a tiny speck, to insignificance. Hill preferred things you can see at close range. Not views, exactly, but objects within your own space, the space you inhabit every day from the moment you get out of bed and feel the floorboards beneath your bare feet. He preferred his birds. He had a real sympathy for them. Not swift ones tearing through the sky, but birds that exhibited no desire to fly, that were content to bump around on the ground.

No photographs of Hill are known to survive. No letters either. As a result, his appearance and his ideas about painting remain largely unknown to us, and his life story must be jiggered together from family stories and whatever scant mention he received in newspapers and other documents. After appearing in two annuals at the National Academy in as many years, his name disappears for a while. It pops up again in 1868 and 1869, in small-print classified advertisements in
The New York Herald
. The ads were placed by the auctioneer Philip Levy, who sold “choice Oil Paintings” at the Artists’ Salesroom on Nassau Street; Hill was one of the artists in his stable.
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He surfaces next in the 1870 census, which describes him as a forty-year-old “artiste,” as if he were French. His wife gave her occupation as “keeping house.” They were no longer in Hoboken, but one town over, in Jersey City. The value of his personal estate was estimated at $300 and unlike some of his neighbors, who included a brick mason and a produce dealer, Hill did not own his house.

He had a large brood by now: six children ranging from an eighteen-year-old daughter to a baby boy. The three oldest children had been born back in London, the fourth in Yonkers. The two youngest, Annie and Percy, were born in New Jersey. Annie was Norman Rockwell’s future mother. She was named for her own mother, Ann Hill. She would be called Nancy to minimize confusion. Which actually maximized confusion.

The Jersey City years appear to have been a relatively prosperous and halcyon time. Hill was still selling an occasional picture. In May of 1873, he appeared in a show at the Brooklyn Art Gallery. The show was called, with more than a bit of hyperbole, Modern Oil Paintings of the Highest Class and included Hill’s
Bevy of Quail
.