American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (6 page)

Rockwell had a surprisingly unsentimental view of his childhood. He wrote his autobiography, or rather dictated it to his son Thomas Rockwell, in 1959, by which time his parents had died. He characterized his father as weak and ineffective. He spoke of his mother as a hypochondriac who occupied her days visiting doctors. She passed countless afternoons lying in bed or on the parlor sofa, the lamp turned low, a table of pills beside her. Rockwell later insisted that she spent most of his childhood supine. He wanted her to stand up. He wanted her to ask him about his day.

“I was never close to my mother,” Rockwell noted matter-of-factly. “When I was a child she would call me into her bedroom and say to me: ‘Norman Perceval, you must always love and honor your mother. She needs you.’ Somehow that put a barrier between us.” He believed she had taken over his father’s life, reduced Waring to her nurse. It seemed to him that women were self-absorbed and men were the caring ones. Men were the ones to whom you could entrust your well-being.

His father worked for the New York division of a Philadelphia-based cotton-goods company, George Wood Sons & Co. Every so often he would come home from the office beaming. And Norman knew instantly what had happened that day. Sitting down to dinner, after Nancy had said grace, Waring would unfold his napkin and arrange it carefully across his knees. Then he would announce with satisfaction, “Mr. Wood was in the office today.” And he would recount his conversation with Mr. Wood verbatim.

Growing up, Rockwell felt neglected by his parents and overshadowed by his older brother, Jarvis, a first-rate student and athlete who was one year ahead of him in school. Norman, by contrast, was slight and pigeon-toed and squinted at the world through owlish glasses. His grades were barely passing and he struggled with reading and writing—today, he surely would be labeled dyslexic.

“I wasn’t a regular Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer,” he later recalled. “I wasn’t an excessively brave kid. I wasn’t very healthy. My brother was quite the opposite, and this had a lot to do with my life. He later played semi-professional baseball and football. He was the real boy’s boy.” After reading
The Little Lame Prince
, a short story by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, Rockwell tried to garner notice by walking around school with an exaggerated limp and pretending to have just one hand. “I wanted to be an artist, or I wanted to be noticed as lame, or anything, because I felt I couldn’t compete with my brother because he was so strong and husky.”
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Rockwell spent his first twelve years in a series of cramped apartments in Upper Manhattan. When he was two years old, the family left West 103rd Street and moved up to 789 St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, which was considered a better neighborhood. Then, when he was six years old, he and his family moved in with his father’s elderly parents, at 832 St. Nicholas Avenue, on the corner of 152nd Street.
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It is not clear how Rockwell felt about his paternal grandfather, the coal dealer from Yonkers, whom he once described in an unpublished essay as “quite a swell” and “a gay blade” despite his financial losses in the depression-addled 1890s.
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He bequeathed Rockwell a hand-me-down that became the bane of his childhood: a “pretentious” double-breasted overcoat with a moss-green velvet collar that elicited mocking laughter from his classmates.

Rockwell made no mention of the sadder events that occurred around this time. Grandma Phebe died in March 1903 and the funeral service was held in the apartment.
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Two winters earlier, there had been another death in the family: that of Rockwell’s Aunt Grace, not yet forty, his father’s sister and the mother of two boys, Sherman and Halsey, all of them ensconced in that same building on St. Nicholas Avenue.
5

Rockwell was a turn-of-the century kid, born just in time to observe the arrival of the twentieth century. Historians tend to describe this period as if everything considered modern—subways, movie theaters, tall buildings—arrived on cue with the new century. Yet the nineteenth century, with its bumpy cobblestones and gas lanterns, its dim apartments in which mothers gave birth, continued well into the twentieth century. And up on St. Nicholas Avenue, the nineteenth century had not fully departed. In the mornings, the men rushed to catch the trolley to work and the women stayed home, leaning on the sills of open windows and counting the errands that had to be done.

Rockwell didn’t view his childhood as the beginning of the modern era. He didn’t see it as the beginning of anything. But perhaps it seemed like a time of endings. He was six years old when Queen Victoria, an ancient matriarch whose name had come to be identified with an entire age, died.

Later that year, President William McKinley was visiting Buffalo, New York, when he was shot by an assassin. Rockwell never forgot “the horror in the streets” on the night of the president’s death, with newsboys shouting “Extra, extra” as people rushed from their apartments and huddled beneath the yellow glare of gas lamps to read the news; no one had a radio yet. The next day, Norman went to church with his family, and both of his parents cried.

A devout Episcopalian, Nancy required her sons to say grace before dinner and to attend church. The family worshiped at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on West 141st Street and Convent Avenue
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—for Norman, a dreary obligation that instilled in him a lifelong aversion to organized religion. He sang in the all-boys church choir year after year. This required three rehearsals during the week after school, the last of which, on Friday evenings, was a dress rehearsal. On Sundays, when Norman and Jarvis returned from church, the boys were forbidden from playing with their toys. Nor were they allowed to look at the funny pages. “We couldn’t read them until Monday,” Rockwell recalled.
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Norman (right) and his older brother, Jarvis, display frogs they caught during one of their summers in Warwick, New York. Although Norman was taller than Jarvis, he claimed to feel physically outmatched by him.

There was one part of his childhood for which he retained affectionate memories. In the summer, the family would take a two-week vacation in the Adirondack Mountains, on a working farm that rented out rooms. The place was owned by the sprawling Jessup family and located in the town that is now Warwick, New York. Years later, Rockwell recalled indolent afternoons when the grown-ups played croquet and the children were free to do as they pleased. What he seemed to cherish was the communality of it all. He warmed to the memory of hayrides on which everyone squeezed into a wagon and sang as the horses trotted along country roads. He recalled “the excitement of eating lunch with the threshing crew at the long board tables.”
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The Jessup children thought of him as less hearty than the other children. “Norman was considered delicate and had to have eggnogs between meals,” Phebe Jessup noted years later. “One of my duties was to prepare them.”
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When did Rockwell realize he wanted to be an artist? He first demonstrated a talent for drawing when he was “six or seven,” as he recalled.
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His father was a casual smoker and in those days each pack of American Fleet cigarettes came with a trading card that portrayed a model of a battleship. Kids liked to collect the cards. Norman, instead, liked to copy them. With his pencil and eraser, he worked with great industry and concentration, careful to get every detail right. There was much smudgy erasing.

His brother, Jarvis, was impressed by the drawings, so much so that he and his friends targeted them for immediate destruction. They would assemble whole fleets on the floor and, boom, declare war, trying to destroy each other’s ships with a pair of scissors. “It was a sort of frustrating art form for me,” Rockwell later said.
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Actually, Jarvis drew pictures of ships as well, one of which can be found among the Rockwell family papers. It’s a charming crayon drawing, a battleship on stormy waters, four flags waving in the breeze. Although Norman always spoke of his brother as the family athlete, all brawn and strutting pride, the label was reductive. Jarvis was a dexterous child, good with his hands and fond of building. In later life, he ended up designing toys for a living.

Norman soon graduated from sketches of battleships to scenes culled from literature. On weekday evenings, after he and Jarvis had finished their homework, the boys would sit at the dining room table as their father read novels to them. There was lots of Charles Dickens. Norman, hunched at the table, the ever-present pencil in his right hand, took great pains with his drawings. He worked slowly, revising as he went and seeming to erase almost as many lines as he drew.

He later recalled sketching a likeness of Mr. Micawber while his father read
David Copperfield
, only to erase the head and ask his father to read the pertinent description again, the passage about Mr. Micawber’s bald cranium. So his father read it again, the sentence about this “stoutish, middle-aged person … with no more hair upon his head … than there is upon an egg.”

Rockwell won his first prize in December 1905, for a now-lost drawing he entered in
The New York Herald
’s Young Contributors Contest. He was eleven years old.
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Despite his early interest in art, Rockwell did not visit a museum until he was quite a bit older. When he felt like looking at pictures, he scarcely needed to venture to the Metropolitan Museum. Instead, he might sit down at the dining room table and open up the latest number of
Collier’s
or
Harper’s Monthly
or
St. Nicholas Magazine
and pore over the illustrations, line drawings and paintings by Howard Pyle or Frederic Remington or Edwin Austin Abbey. In truth, there was more new art by American artists to be found in magazines than there was on the walls of museums.

This was the period known as the Golden Age of Illustration, although it was only in nostalgic retrospect that the phrase encompassed events in America. Initially, it referred to a movement that began in London in the sixties—the 1860s, that is—when leading English artists tried their hand at wood engraving in order to furnish pictures for books and magazines. At the time, an artist could cross from easel painting to illustration with impunity. No one thought less of Sir John Everett Millais because he drew illustrations for Trollope novels that were published serially in the magazine
Once a Week
, although eyebrows did go up when he committed the mercenary sin of allowing his painting of a very blond, bubble-blowing boy (
Bubbles
) to appear on the wrapper of Pears’ soap.

In America, magazine illustration didn’t gain much aesthetic momentum until the 1880s. It had to wait for the arrival of Howard Pyle, a brilliant Quaker artist and writer. He is often called the father of American illustration—a dreary cliché, but a fittingly patriarchal image for a man who spawned a progeny of famous illustrators, from N. C. Wyeth on down, and ran a school out of his studio in Wilmington, Delaware. More important than the school was Pyle’s own oeuvre: a shelf of children’s classics that elevated American illustration to the level it enjoyed in Europe. His admirers included Vincent van Gogh, who once wrote, in a letter to his brother: “Do you know of an American magazine called
Harper’s Monthly
? There are things in it that strike me dumb with admiration, including sketches of a Quaker town in the olden days by Howard Pyle.”
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Pyle was Rockwell’s favorite, hands down. Rockwell would study reproductions of his paintings of Colonial America and marvel at their vividness. When Pyle painted the story of the American Revolution, he imported the lofty goals of history painting—that is, factual accuracy—into the realm of popular illustration. He would track down the right musket and the right tricorn hat. He would labor to paint the right number of bricks in a background wall a hundred feet off.
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He wanted to relate the past at its most present, its most lifelike. His painting of George Washington at Valley Forge makes you feel the wind blowing through double-breasted buttoned-up coats, the crunch of boots on snow. When unsure about a certain detail, he might “run down to Washington and take a photograph.”
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And perhaps it was his camera eyes as much as anything that fascinated the young Rockwell.

He particularly loved Pyle’s pirates, those long-haired, eye-patched thugs who kept their stolen booty in trunks. Here were Blackbeard and the rest, the seamen who terrorized the early American colonists. Although they came with the same guarantee of historical-authenticity-or-your-money-back as his other motifs, Pyle’s pirates—with their head scarves knotted in the back and hoop earrings—have since been exposed as mostly fiction. Their clothing has less in common with actual pirates’ duds than with the flamboyant outfits of Spanish gypsies. They reveal Pyle as a second-rate researcher but a fabulous illustrator and they became the go-to images for most every film about pirates.