American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (9 page)

Although Rockwell had been taught that pictures are the “servant of text,” here he breaks that rule. His illustration for “The Deserted Village” has less to do with Goldsmith’s vision than his own. Traditionally, illustrations accompanying “The Deserted Village” have emphasized the theme of exodus, portraying men and women driven out of an idyllic, tree-laden English landscape. But Rockwell moved his scene indoors and chose to capture a moment of tenderness between an older man and a young man, even though no such scene is described in the poem.

Two lines from “The Deserted Village” are inscribed along the bottom of Rockwell’s drawing: “But in his duty prompt at every call / He watched, he wept, he prayed and felt for all.” The words refer to a preacher in the poem but can serve as a job description of the artistic calling as well.

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Rockwell’s family life, in the meantime, had become a bit sadder and unanchored. His mother, who was now in her midforties, felt overmatched caring for her family as well as for her father-in-law, John, the coal dealer from Yonkers, who was still living with the Rockwells. Nancy Rockwell claimed she could no longer keep house and was tired and miserable all the time; her husband was sympathetic. Early in 1912, six years after they had left New York City and moved to Mamaroneck, the Rockwell family moved back to New York.
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Their new residence was Mrs. Frothingham’s boardinghouse, which occupied two adjacent brownstones on the Upper West Side and offered furnished rooms and three meals a day.

Although living in the city freed Rockwell of his hour-long commute to Mamaroneck, he took a dim view of his new lodgings. In the evenings, when his classmates at the League might go out for a drink, Rockwell would return to Mrs. Frothingham’s, where dinner was served punctually at 6:30 in the cellar dining room. He and his brother and their parents had a table of their own, a corner affair where they said grace and talked among themselves over plates of knockwurst and mashed potatoes and canned fruit for dessert.

Here he was, a young artist living not in Greenwich Village or the Latin Quarter, but in a boarding house among his parents and a dozen or so middle-aged lodgers of whom he was not exactly enamored. They included the “pitiful Misses Palmers,” two sharp-boned spinster sisters who shared a little room on the second floor and had jobs selling lingerie at B. Altman’s. Whenever he left his room, it seemed, they would poke their heads out the door and implore, “Oh, Mr. Rockwell, please stop by for a cup of chocolate.” He would decline politely, explaining that he had a pressing deadline.
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He was no more fond of Mr. Leffingwell, “the star boarder,” deserted by his wife, loudly expounding on his political views, or Dr. Boston, a white-bearded Scotsman who had an unsightly spot on the back of his head where hair refused to grow. In his autobiography, Rockwell was so indiscreet about the Palmer sisters and Mr. Leffingwell and Dr. Boston that his lawyer, who was shown an early draft, suggested he change the names of the boarders and delete certain comments about drinking binges and other unsavory habits. He obliged and the boarders in his autobiography remain pseudonymous.
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Adding to his frustration was the lack of privacy in the boardinghouse. He shared his bedroom with his brother Jarvis, whose shelves were jammed with trophies and mitts and all sorts of sports paraphernalia. Norman felt like he did not have enough room for his desk, which he used as his drawing board and also to store his art supplies. He could scarcely turn around once he opened his folding easel in the corner of his room.

When summer came, Rockwell arranged to study for a few weeks in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with Charles Hawthorne, a disciple of the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase, whose school Rockwell had attended in his youth. Hawthorne, too, had his own school, the now-historic Cape Cod School of Art. Rockwell heard about it from classmates at the League, who had made it sound impossibly idyllic, this casual academy where you lived and painted and had your crits given out of doors, on Saturdays, within view of the harbor.

Renting a room in Provincetown, Rockwell was glad to be out of New York that summer, extricated from his social encounters with the loquacious Palmer sisters and the rest. In Cape Cod, he befriended the other art students in his rooming house, including a young woman from Chicago named Frances Starr. In the afternoons, they would walk to the seaward side of the Cape and swim in the breakers and sometimes lie around the sand for hours. “Evening we’d sit in the kitchen of the boardinghouse and stretch canvases,” he later recalled.
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Then eighteen years old, Rockwell was finally free from the constraining gaze of his parents, living on his own. But as much as he liked Frances, he had no interest in pushing the relationship beyond the platonic. “I never tried to kiss her,” he later noted. “I didn’t even hold her hand. Somehow I felt that would ruin things.”
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He never did cotton to his teacher, Mr. Hawthorne, as the students called him. His philosophy of art drew heavily on French Impressionism, with all that implies about painting without preparatory sketches. In addition to drawing from the model, who was usually a Portuguese fisherman, he required his students to traipse through Provincetown in search of stimulating motifs. It could be anything: a sailboat, the facade of a squat cottage, children picking up shells. He wanted them to work quickly from direct observation, without revising, to be trained in the technique of
premier coup
, to relish the immediacy of a brushstroke and see how each mark commits you to a certain range of options, narrows your path. He urged them not to make “pictures” but rather to focus on their process, to lay down brushstrokes as if each one represented its own event.

The technique did not appeal to Rockwell and by temperament he was too nervous to embrace an aesthetic of spontaneity. He was less interested in the
premier coup
than the second coup and the third coup and the ten thousandth coup, in painting and repainting the human figure until his initial marks were buried beneath a blizzard of revisions and something interesting had emerged. Oil paint, in its own way, was a forgiving medium because you could always repaint what you had done the day before. For this reason, he did not like working in watercolor, which left too many visible tracks.

When the summer ended, Rockwell promised his friends he would return to Provincetown the following summer. Perhaps he meant it at the time, thinking of the free, open-ended and interesting life he had discovered with his artist friends. But in the end, it was not freedom from routine that he sought. It was the chance to advance in the world, and he would not return to Provincetown.

FOUR

THE BOY SCOUTS VERSUS THE ARMORY SHOW

(SEPTEMBER 1912 TO DECEMBER 1913)

Rockwell began his second year at the Art Students League as monitor of Bridgman’s class, an honor reserved for the best student. Monitors assisted with teaching demonstrations, in exchange for which their tuition was waived. At the end of class, Bridgman would hand Rockwell a “model”—an actual human skeleton—and ask that he put it away, which could be unnerving. It was kept in a locker, and Rockwell usually had to make a few attempts to hang the skeleton by its hook and close the locker door without having the limbs fly out. He prayed he wouldn’t crush a humerus or an ulna or some other precious bone in the process.

As a budding artist, Rockwell had no particular allegiance to the League. On October 28, he also enrolled in a life-drawing class across town, at the National Academy of Art, where he had taken classes in high school and which did not charge tuition.
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But most of his time was spent away from classrooms, trying to secure paying assignments. He had been an art student for all of one year and already felt eager to be done with it, eager for the future to come. He relied, for contacts, on a list of names from Thomas Fogarty, which got him only so far. New York was the center of the book trade, but appointments with art directors were not easily arranged. Rockwell had to be persistent. He had to climb the steep stairways of brownstones in Greenwich Village, wander hallways, knock politely, hope someone would agree to see him for a minute or two and look at his portfolio of sample illustrations. Although Rockwell was not dashing, he dressed neatly and had a nice personal manner. He said hello in a resonant baritone and shook hands firmly, with the deliberateness of a shy man who was looking for something to hold onto.

His business card left no doubt that he was eager. In the center of the card, in bold capitals, was NORMAN P. ROCKWELL. Then running down the left side he listed his multitiered occupation: “Artist, Illustrator, Letterer, Cartoonist, sign painting, Christmas cards, calendars, magazine covers, frontispieces, still lifes, murals, portraits, layouts, design, etc.”

He was routinely rejected before he even applied. Pretty secretaries seated behind wooden desks would look up at him, a scrawny teenager and, their eyes brimming with regret, inform him that Mr. X was not available to see him. Sorry, Mr. Y was tied up in a meeting. Mr. Z was vacationing upstate.

New York, the city of a million doors, was also the capital of the closed door. But Rockwell was willing to endure a hundred “nos” for the chance of hearing one “Yes, Mr. Rockwell” and was forever plotting new ways to be seen.

During his first year of school, Rockwell had visited the American Book Company, a textbook publisher with offices on Washington Square. Early one morning, he persuaded a janitor to let him into the anteroom outside the art director’s office. For the next few days, he returned to the same spot and tried to talk to the art director, who would zip past him, appearing annoyed. One day, the art director said with exasperation, “If I give you a job will you permit me to digest my breakfast in peace?”
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And so he received what would be his first-ever published assignment: a set of illustrations for Fanny Eliza Coe’s earnest history book,
Founders of Our Country
(1912). Rockwell was asked to illustrate the chapter on the explorer Samuel de Champlain and for this he produced five black-and-white, pencil-and-wash scenes.
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After he sent them in to the art director, one came back with scathing criticism and instructions to redo it. He immediately saw the problem. Although he had portrayed Champlain standing on the high rocks of Quebec, pointing to ships gliding down the river, the river was on the same level as his feet! Rockwell wondered how he could have done this. After that, he never let an illustration leave his studio until he had checked and rechecked it innumerable times.

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It was Fogarty who sent him down to McBride, Nast & Company, on Union Square North, in the heart of the book publishing industry. After showing his portfolio, Rockwell was asked to illustrate a children’s book,
The Tell-Me-Why Stories
, by C. H. Claudy. It was published in the fall of 1912 and on the cover is a watercolor of a smoldering volcano. He signed his first book cover Norman P. Rockwell.

Rockwell’s first published book illustration showed the explorer Samuel de Champlain on the rocks of Quebec.

He also undertook non-art jobs during his time at school. He was busing tables at Child’s restaurant when his classmate at the League, Harold Groth, an extra at the Metropolitan Opera House, dragged him along one night to audition. Rockwell, whose musical experience was limited to singing in the church choirs of his youth, wound up on stage as an extra.
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In later life, he loved to recall his encounters with Enrico Caruso, the famous tenor, who happened to have a second, admittedly less celebrated career as an artist who specialized in caricature. In addition to publishing his work in the Italian magazine
La Follia di New York
, Caruso liked to dash off sketches of his fellow performers and always seemed busy with a pen. Rockwell thought he had draftsmanly potential and was glad to provide a nod of encouragement.

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In October 1912 Rockwell visited the Boy Scouts of America, which had its headquarters on the eighth floor of the so-called Fifth Avenue Building, at Twenty-third Street. The two-year-old organization was loosely affiliated with the scouting movement founded in England in 1907 by Lord Robert Baden-Powell. An unusual eccentric even by British standards, Baden-Powell was a decorated military hero who became obsessed with the character of Peter Pan after seeing J. M. Barrie’s play at a London theater in 1904. He returned the next day to see it again and went on to construct “a highly successful career out of his idealization of boys and boyhood,” as the literary scholar Marjorie Garber observes.
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Today, in our boy-centered universe, it is hard to imagine that American educators once worried that boys were not aggressive enough. But such was the case circa 1910, when it was said that the comforts of modern life were sapping boys of their masculinity. For one thing, the demographic shift that moved families from farms to the city was depriving boys of exercise and fresh air. Moreover, the notion of men as the stronger sex was under siege from the suffragist movement.