Norman Rockwell (14 page)

Tom Rockwell has suggested that an aura of sexuality askew or run amok permeated his father’s memories of the women who lounged around the house while their husbands went to work. He was, after all, an eighteen-year-old tall, slender man, whose steady purpose and self-confidence animated the casual charm he had already mastered. Too suggestive of the suffocating attention his own coy mother had sometimes paid him, the pathetic flirtations of the bored women “in their rollers and their housecoats” sealed Rockwell’s image of city life as decadence and decay. A tell-all book about the titillations of living in a typical mid-level boardinghouse during this period included the chapters “In the Wrong Bed,” “From Bad to Worse,” and “Love Finds Its Way.” The vision of Norman loading the family belongings in Mamaroneck, storing the furniture at a polite but disapproving family member’s house in Yonkers, and then unpacking the objects that would fit in the boardinghouse, is unpleasant, to be sure.

But the reason that the family left Mamaroneck so suddenly may well have been the discovery that Nancy Hill had breast cancer. The tiny woman would deal resolutely, even courageously, with the crisis, although she refused to confront the emotional trauma of losing her breast and facing possible death. “What was really interesting about Aunt Nancy, who everybody thought was a hypochondriac, was that when something was actually wrong, as with this case, she did what needed to be done,” Mary Amy Orpen remembers. “I have to give her credit. In her own way, she had lots of spunk. From everything I heard later, on the day of the operation to remove the malignancy and the breast as well, she got herself to the surgeon—all alone—and after the office operation, returned home by herself as well.”

Shocking as it seems today, breast cancer, which by the late nineteenth century had begun to achieve the proportions of an epidemic it retains a century later, was treated in the doctor’s office. At least anesthesia was now routinely administered; until the 1860s, a glass of wine was often the sole support the patient received before the cutting began. By 1912, Nancy was given both ether and an antibiotic. She probably was subjected to the radical mastectomy—removal of the entire breast, the lymph nodes, and the large pectoral muscle with connecting ligaments and tendons—that Dr. William Halsted had developed a few decades earlier. Mary Amy Orpen recalls that her aunt eventually had the second breast removed as well.

Nancy Rockwell’s cancer was caught early, and she recovered. But discussion of such disease was still taboo in general company, and even among family members in some Victorian circles. Rockwell apparently never knew that his mother had suffered such a serious threat. In spite of the credit she deserves for her courage, Nancy’s repression of emotion during this traumatic period typifies a style of coping that her son mastered as well, though he would deny the bogeys differently by painting redemptive pleasures in their place. Without fuller disclosure of the facts, Rockwell naturally assumed that Nancy’s hypochondria and mental fragility landed them at the boardinghouse—and he may have been correct, regardless of his mother’s physical illness. Her attacks of “nerves” disabled her more than anything concrete, according to her relatives.

Predictably, the boardinghouse served up irresistible raw materials to reconfirm Rockwell’s Dickensian template for the city. To move into such a lower-middle-class “home” just as he was earning his wings humiliated him, and, as a result, he interpreted its machinations through the most dramatic magnifying glass at his imagination’s disposal. The women come off, in his recollections, as near harridans parading around all day half-dressed, disgusting the fastidious young man with their sloppy housedresses flapping open, their discour-teous pink curlers, their constant nagging discontent. When their husbands arrived home nightly from work, they dolled themselves up—not for their spouses’ edification, but to be taken out on the town to redeem their boring, listless days. Rockwell’s contempt for their laziness oozes out of his descriptions, and the unhealthy air of a house full of unsatisfied sexual urges bombarding the young artist—“too young” to compel the women to button up their gowns in modesty around him—smells overripe in his narratives.

To enable himself to escape the claustrophobia of the boardinghouse, Rockwell rented a studio space next door, so that he could slip out in the middle of the night if he wanted to work up a new idea. But he found the whole setup stifling, and a few months in this atmosphere helped motivate him to grab the chance to spend the summer away from the city, which, though he didn’t seem to notice, had functioned admirably as a source of personal fulfillment as long as his parents were living elsewhere. Now he went to Cape Cod, to Charles Hawthorne’s artist’s school, where he would spend perhaps the most idyllic three months of his life.

To understand the significance of his summer at Provincetown, Rockwell’s myth of unwavering loyalty to the art of illustration must be dismantled. Certainly, he had learned enough about individual heroes of the Golden Age of Illustration to recognize his natural affinities with them. He knew that he had the personality common to great illustrators—he could see that from the hammy theatrics he shared with Edwin Austin Abbey, or through his Howard Pyle–like obsession with the accuracy of the detail. Once he became an art student, the long working hours that distinguished illustrators as overly conscientious or, to their denigrators, drudgelike, came naturally to him. And he honored the profession of illustration in and of itself, as one that allowed for the mass reproduction of art for the most people in the highest causes.

But though he entered the Art Students League determined to become an illustrator, his rapid success engendered its own burden, deferred for those less precocious: was such a talented man really willing to turn his back on the world of “pure” art in favor of the “merely” commercial? In spite of the official League position that illustration was just as fine an art as fine art—and even accounting for the frequently rehearsed historical arguments that aesthetic hierarchies didn’t exist until late in the Renaissance, at best—line-and-ink drawing, as well as painting that was local and tendentious in its aim, had never enjoyed the position of “fine” easel painting, defensive assertions to the contrary.

Still, had Rockwell been inexorably pleased with himself, he could be excused. To have achieved a modest commercial success before he turned twenty exceeded the fantasies even he had entertained for years. But at this point in history, the thirty-year reign of the Golden Age of Illustration was besieged by threats everywhere, and the romantic validation of the pure painter held the day. Rockwell was not, as he would later claim, immune to the siren call of fine art. For one thing, during the past few years he had been exposed in depth to painters—the Dutch School, in particular—with whom he’d been only passingly familiar before. And, appeasing his substantial ego, teachers and students had praised his talent for pure painting; the comment about Velázquez that he repeated from the artist-manqué implied a certain envious awareness of him on others’ parts.

It is easy to overlook Rockwell’s agonizing crises of doubt about his vocation. Because the rollicking good time he makes of his life as an illustrator depends, in his autobiography, on an accretion of nonstop detail, he cannily disengages the reader’s normal sensitivity to subtle but crucial shifts in his tone. Honest on the one hand, the truthtelling takes second place to the narrative energy that distracts the reader. The overload of detail itself, like a nonstop talker, dissuades the listener from probing deeper—and protects the storyteller from painful analysis as well.

Retrospectively, the successful illustrator presents his decision to attend Provincetown as serendipitous, an impulsive gesture to escape the metaphoric stench of the boardinghouse. And he counters that corruption with the exquisitely fresh sea air of Provincetown, where the fisherman community represents the pure and the good. But just as Rockwell had brushed aside any appearance of deliberately choosing his teachers when he entered the League in 1911, so now he was downplaying the seriousness with which he approached studying easel painting with one of the League’s own. When Rockwell narrates his memories of the summer that he allowed himself to spend as a carefree, quasi-bohemian artist, indulging in an unconditional happiness he would rarely experience, the loss beneath his yearning temporarily disrupts the narrative flow—if one pauses to listen. The summer Rockwell spent studying with Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown crowned the illustrator’s lifelong association of escape from the city with unfettered joy, convincing him, if only for a few months, that he was talented enough to paint anything.

8

Earning His Sea Legs

In 1894, the year that Norman Rockwell was born, Charles Webster Hawthorne arrived in New York City and promptly became a night student at the Art Students League. Two years later, he began studying with William Merritt Chase, and during the summer of 1896 he attended Chase’s Long Island artists’ school in Shinnecock. Here he studied plein air painting, learning how to interpret outdoor light through a wide-ranging color palette. In 1898, Hawthorne traveled to Holland, where he fell under the spell of Frans Hals, whose Dutch tonal style influenced Hawthorne’s oeuvre. After he returned to the United States, Hawthorne opened his own school, choosing the tip of Cape Cod for its rugged, picturesque terrain and its dramatic quality of light.

Hawthorne attracted thousands of painters through the years, and it wasn’t long before Provincetown became the summer destination of students determined to join the ranks of professional artists. The friendly fishing community with the stellar northern light provided cheap living ready-made for artists: you could rent a room for fifty cents a night; for $25, you could get a studio for the entire summer. Writers, journalists, Greenwich Village freethinkers, and activists soon seized opportunities to visit their painter friends. Rockwell’s tenure in the summer of 1912 predated by only a few years what became the urban sophisticates’ hegira to the far end of the Cape; when he studied at Provincetown, the freedom from commercial constraints, the sense of being part of a special group of interesting, vibrant people among a solid and welcoming community of commoners, the down-to-earth nature of the worldly, self-made, but low-key Hawthorne, who believed passionately in the value of solid teaching of the fundamentals, all combined to give Rockwell a brief taste of life as a pure artist.

Sociable as ever, upon his arrival Rockwell quickly made friends, and the artsy group he inhabited played their roles to the hilt. The students ate, for instance, only when they had money, even if that meant dying for art. One girl whom Rockwell befriended went without food for three days, in spite of her chronic ill health, which turned out, romantically but fatally, to be consumption. They compensated for the paucity of libations with the healthy outdoor air, where they set up their easels for plein air rituals whenever the salt breezes allowed. At the Art Students League, the studious Rockwell had mostly refused to participate in the yearly costume balls; here, he and his friend Bill Bogart won first place at the end of the summer for their dragon outfit. When they weren’t painting or eating or dreaming aloud, he and Bill fastidiously plotted the winter trip to Paris that they were determined to take. Memorizing the most efficient paths from one famous location to the other—“You want to go to the Opéra. How do you get there?”—Norman and Bill quizzed each other until they could have drawn the maps themselves.

But if he dreamed about going to Paris to study, Rockwell’s deepest loyalties were to painters farther north: the Dutch and Flemish schools that included Frans Hals, Pieter Brueghel, and Johannes Vermeer as well as his hero, Rembrandt. Their attention to the domestic and local, to interiors and mundane scenes as the rightful domain of high art, influenced the illustrator deeply, as did their strong articulations of color, light, and space. Hawthorne’s pedagogy echoed many of Rockwell’s aesthetic values, ranging from his allegiance to Hals to his substitution of Provincetown’s local rough-hewn Portuguese fishing community for the Netherlands’ domestic scenes of homey, untutored men and women.

It is true that the nineteenth-century genre painting exemplified by Americans such as George Caleb Bingham and Winslow Homer contributed to Norman Rockwell’s artistic pedigree: both luminaries had succeeded as important easel painters as well as reaping commercial rewards for their illustrations. But it was the Dutch School that spoke to him personally—a predilection that Charles Haw-thorne’s teaching strongly reinforced. Within a few years, a copy of Rembrandt’s self-portrait would welcome Rockwell each day to his easel. With no close second, Rembrandt was the painter whose ability to convey his love of humanity in his subjects’ faces filled Rockwell with awe; and it was Rembrandt whose broad range of techniques and attention to detail inspired Rockwell’s own quest for perfection, even when he was painting magazine illustrations that would be quickly discarded. It was Rembrandt whom the illustrator would commend without hesitation when queried about the strongest influence on his work. And, when asked what art he would take to a desert island, he replied, without hesitation, that he would take a “Rembrandt or two” and “a good Howard Pyle.”

At the summer’s end, Rockwell returned far more reluctantly to Manhattan than he’d supposed possible. He changed the direction of his League studies for the fall semester, enrolling in only one class—drawing—taught by Frank Vincent DuMond. Like Bridgman a renowned teacher, DuMond possessed additional cachet as a prominent easel painter. But even more dramatic was Rockwell’s reenrollment in the National Academy of Design, where he signed up for two fall courses: illustration and life studies.

The summer with Hawthorne had profoundly influenced him, that much is clear. Rockwell’s willingness to return to the staid Academy, the site of his earlier expulsion for not completing an assigned picture, reflected his decision to develop himself as a fine artist. But almost at once, this decision was forced to compete with the carrot of financial prosperity dangled in front of him. To his ambivalent pleasure, he found that he was as much in demand as ever with publications needing illustrations for literature aimed at contemporary youth. No longer forced to work as an extra at the Met to pay his studio fees, he had established enough of a reputation that he was receiving steady assignments from children’s magazines. Although they were not the prestigious adult forums he would have preferred, they still paid well and provided all-important public exposure. Even Howard Pyle had started out at
St. Nicholas,
an important endorsement for the path Rockwell was treading.

In late 1912, impressed by the quality of his work and his obvious tenacity, Thomas Fogarty urged his former student to present his portfolio to Edward Cave, previously the editor of
Recreation Magazine
and newly appointed to take the local monthly,
Boys’ Life,
national. Cave auditioned him on a tedious-to-draw Boy Scouts camping guide, then assigned him a story set for early 1913 publication—the first of what would prove to be four hundred contributions by Rockwell to
Boys’ Life.

At the beginning of the fall flurry of commissions, Rockwell was exhilarated if soon exhausted by the sheer amount of work he was undertaking, though his earnings were still modest. Word was spreading that he produced fresh, sharply executed illustrations for children’s literature, at a time when the field had been tackled primarily by female illustrators, such as Jessie Wilcox and Sarah Stilwell Weber, with the important exception of the Leyendecker brothers. Work—ever more work—would prove to be his salvation for the rest of his life, and, at this early date, it liberated him from the dry-as-dust studies at the Academy as well. Still, after the flush of earning real money and being treated like a professional wore off, Rockwell found illustrating for children’s magazines repetitive and tiresome. Intensely ambitious, he was comparing himself against the best in his tradition—Howard Pyle, most of all. Too soon after returning from Provincetown, the pleasures of finding himself in demand transmogrified into the grind of a deadening routine: he found himself emotionally harried as he worried over meeting magazine deadlines for drawings he was not particularly interested in doing. And by late fall 1912,
Boys’ Life
was making sounds about promoting him to a more permanent, lucrative position, possibly as art director. All of eighteen years old, he found himself growing restless.

After the promise of Provincetown, he now imagined himself consigned, ironically, to a lifetime of illustrating for American boys the “real boy” identity he had not that long ago desperately wanted for himself, while he watched his brother fall into it, effortlessly, instead. As he pondered his way out—how to become a great artist of one sort or another, instead of the scary dead end of children’s illustration that he now sometimes feared—his salvation appeared in the unlikely person of John Fleming Wilson, well-known author of
The Land Claimers.
The popular 1911 novel centered on the often greedy and sometimes courageous pioneers who rushed into Oregon’s rugged Indian coastal territory once the government opened the Siletz lands to white settlements. The same year, Wilson published a highly successful science-fiction short story in
The Saturday Evening Post,
“The Rejected Planet.”

Struggling with alcoholism when Rockwell contacted him for advice about illustrating a story the writer had sold to
Boys’ Life,
Wilson had nonetheless promptly responded to the artist’s request to help him locate an authentic life raft for the painting. Taking Rockwell under his (usually inebriated) wing, the thirty-four-year-old writer hatched a convincing plan, supported by their joint trips to Scribner’s publishing offices, where he’d leave Rockwell outside. Financed by Wilson’s publisher, the twosome would travel to the Panama Canal, a topic of great cultural interest at the time. “I’ll write . . . you’ll illustrate. . . . We’ll blast the canal and Davis and Pennell into the bargain,” Wilson told the awestruck student. Richard Harding Davis, a war correspondent during the late nineteenth century, wrote manly adventure accounts, including magazine articles on the progress of the canal. More important to Rockwell, from January to March 1912, Joseph Pennell had quietly created thirty of the most vividly evocative lithographs ever produced, elegantly conveying how the crucial final stages of construction were bringing the Panama Canal to life. Massive locks of a size never before seen, drops, cranes—Pennell’s line drawings offered vivid witness. Joseph Pennell—not the publicly recognized name that many important illustrators retain—was well respected by Howard Pyle and is considered by some art historians to have done more than any other single artist of the period to elevate the quality and status of illustration into an art.

To Rockwell, the promise of competing on this level—in this league—represented the ultimate fulfillment of his dreams. The resulting coverage—Wilson’s text illustrated by Rockwell—would, the young artist thought, ensure his fame. Rockwell was stunned; he was positioning himself to become nothing less than a Howard Pyle, a success earlier in his career than even the Master had managed. Let Frederic Remington and N. C. Wyeth take the West; he’d be a manly artist forging a more exotic path. Or he’d be the true boy-artist, conquering nothing less than the Panama Canal. “I was intensely ambitious,” he would quietly, still painfully, explain of this period later.

Over a period of months, Wilson convinced his eager companion to invest in equipment, preventative medical care, and even to cancel bona fide commissions in order to complete preliminary studies for other Wilson texts. He took Rockwell drinking in the mornings and to bordellos in the afternoons—all of which, the illustrator carefully declared in his later years, he left untouched. To his father’s increasingly skeptical inquiries about Wilson’s character, Rockwell replied that the man was simply too busy to meet Waring.

The inevitable happened: Wilson skipped town, Scribner’s told Rockwell they had never heard of the journey they had supposedly funded, and Rockwell was shamed in front of his family and friends. Most of all, the trajectory he had by now fantasized for his career, all of which depended on staking his claim in Panama, evaporated in hours. He came, he softly informs us, “as near to having a nervous breakdown as I ever have.”

Rockwell descended into a clinical depression during the late winter of 1912 that lasted several months, its grayness sapping his interest in eating, socializing, and, for perhaps the only time in his life, his art. Paralyzed into inactivity, he sat in his dark studio and stared at the pigeons on his windowsill. The usually emotionally stiff Waring, true to his good-hearted nature, tried hard to rally his son, and when he failed, he and Nancy sent Norman to spend long afternoons walking the countryside at one of the farms where their child had earlier thrived. There, in true Wordsworthian fashion, Rockwell slowly regained his soul, back in touch with the mythology of innocent childhood that inspired his art.