Norman Rockwell (11 page)

Whatever the reasons for his parents’ frugality, Rockwell decided early on that he wanted more money. At the age of thirteen, the boy mowed lawns for spending money, but soon he explored more efficient enterprises. His best investment (costing the young teenager the whopping sum of $25, equivalent to around $430 in 2000) was buying the mail route out to Orienta Point, the “other” end of the village where millionaires lived, the site of luxurious mid-nineteenth-century summer mansions, their old boundaries marked today by what have become the main streets of the wealthiest part of the town. Norman rose every morning at five-thirty to deliver mail to the distant (three and a half miles) residences, since ordinary service stopped short of the estates. He received twenty-five cents per day per customer.

An observant philanthropist and fellow parishioner whose family had built St. Thomas’s Church, Mrs. James Constable took special notice of the industrious boy and treated him (albeit in the kitchen, with the butler) to cakes and ice cream every Monday, when he came to collect his money at the end of Orienta Avenue. He wanted to impress the gracious lady who kindly solicited new customers for him among her rich friends. But when the boy tried to match her sophistication, he embarrassed himself by mispronouncing the occasional word. Her gentle corrections mortified him and convinced him more than ever that money bought knowledge and station in life; that if his father earned more than a measly office worker’s salary, he would know how to speak proper English.

Making money was especially important to the adolescent in light of his father’s talk about the alarming market setbacks of 1909, one of eight cyclic recessions that hit the emerging American economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Norman was old enough to realize that if one of those economic downturns had ruined his grandfather financially, it might do the same to Waring. But possessing wealth had become somewhat of a goal in itself to the boy, a marker of something less innocent than mere financial security. Slightly uneasy at a trait he didn’t approve of but still couldn’t shake entirely, the middle-aged artist acknowledged his youthful embarrassment at being less well-heeled than those around him: “I imagined that if you had money you talked correctly. And more—you were self-confident, well-mannered, free from embarrassing accidents, debo-nair, handsome, et cetera. How money performed these prodigies I never stopped to think.”

Rockwell’s poor grades in school, in tandem with comments he later made about his restlessness in the classroom, suggest that he needed outlets for his youthful energy anyway; with money his objective, his industriousness knew no limits. By the time he was fourteen, he had begun tutoring two boys—either in algebra or drawing—and he discovered that he was a fairly talented teacher, especially when it came to explaining methodically how to approach a task. At the same time, because he was preparing to be confirmed in April, he spent more time than usual with the pastor of St. Thomas’s, who agreed with Mrs. Constable’s assessment of Norman’s potential. He arranged for the boy to instruct the already illustrious Ethel Barrymore and her friend in the rudiments of painting. Barrymore, who had helped pay for her brother Lionel to attend the Art Students League and to study art in Paris the year before, encouraged her young teacher to pursue the same paths. “I spent every Saturday afternoon that summer sketching with Ethel Barrymore . . . and her friend,” Rockwell later recalled. “I went along more for the companionship than anything else, I think. We would paddle out in a canoe to Hen Island or some deserted beach, where I set up the easels in a sheltered spot and showed the ladies how to hold the brushes or mix the paint to get the dry green of the beach grass. After an hour or so we’d have a little snack from the picnic basket they always brought along, and I’d pack up and we’d return. Ethel Barrymore didn’t sketch very much. I remember she was beautiful, absolutely magnificent.”

Rockwell’s reaction to Barrymore’s beauty and charisma, both of which bowled over a young Winston Churchill as well, reverberates with undertones similar to the bedroom scene where the girls’ underthings gently lift in the breeze, inspiring the youth to a new level of reverie. This time, though, with the woman actually present, he describes himself as the unworthy observer: “That must have been a sight—me, a long gawky kid bending over the graceful Ethel Barrymore, guiding her shapely hand across the paper, the sea wind ruffling her hair, my great Adam’s apple churning up and down my neck. She was very gracious, queenly; I was almost dumb with admiration, awe.” Such awe sounds as indebted to her quintessential femininity as to her celebrity.

Ethel Barrymore apparently reported favorably on her tutor. His reputation as an artist grew, and the kindly Mrs. Constable commissioned the tireless young man to design four Christmas cards for her to send to friends. Her munificence was a good thing, too, because Norman had hatched a plan.

7

Manifest Destiny

Norman had decided to study art; he had known for as long as he could remember that he wanted to be a painter, and now he felt ready to begin. To their credit—and as testimony to Rockwell’s absolute determination when he wanted something badly—his parents allowed him to study on Saturdays at New York City’s Chase School of Art (now Parsons School of Design). He caught the trolley on Palmer Avenue at seven
A.M.
, riding to 188th Street and Bronx Park, where he took a subway to 125th Street and transferred to the west side. The trip took two hours each way, since Norman had to use the cheaper mode—trolley and subway—versus the faster but more expensive train. Observing his unwavering commitment, and swallowing their amazement at his detailed attention to every assignment, his parents convinced his principal to let him skip school on Wednesday afternoons to attend Chase then as well.

William Merritt Chase, who first trained at the National Academy of Design in the early 1870s, had taught at the Art Students League (and would again) until the mid-nineties, when he left to create his own school. He aimed at nothing less than transforming New York—whose city scenes he depicted long before gritty urban legends became the stuff of modern painting—into the center of the art world. Still, for all his self-styled progressiveness, Chase was categorical in his aesthetic judgments. On the one hand, he had a reputation for being forward-thinking: Kenneth Hayes Miller, the teacher of many of America’s most important regionalist painters, sought out Chase after being expelled from studies at the competing school. But later on, Chase’s limited vision would handicap his appreciation of the Armory Show, America’s formal introduction to Europe’s modern art. “Dressed in frock coat, top hat, and boutonniere,” the dandified artist strolled around “reviling everything,” according to art historian Gail Levin.

When Norman Rockwell began studying at Chase School of Art in 1908, he had not yet decided what kind of artist he would be: commercial or fine. At this time, the divide between the two was not as severe as it would quickly become; artists instead made a stronger distinction between illustration and advertising. He knew he was talented; so many adults, and even his own boyhood friends, had nurtured this conviction from the time he was six years old. And his parents encouraged him wholeheartedly, assuming his abilities to be inherited and based on a natural foundation. “It’d be nice to make my life a sob story,” he recalled years later, “but the truth is, my parents supported me from the beginning.” At Chase, Rockwell apparently began considering illustration as his most logical career. The timing for such a decision was propitious: “The Golden Age of Illustration,” when magazine and book illustrators were the celebrities of their day, was at its peak when Rockwell went to Chase.

At the Chase School, Rockwell received his first training in the history of art, and here he learned to appreciate the tightly controlled brushstroke of James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, whom he would later praise as the earliest influences upon his artistic development. Both painters achieved incredible beauty through virtuoso technique in which each brushstroke contributed to perfection, and both men avoided succumbing to the inherent danger of overworking a scene, a temptation to which Rockwell often yielded. It must have mollified the student that Sargent had painted “his own” Ethel Barrymore in 1904, a portrait that appeared frequently in publicity releases. Equally gratifying, Rockwell absorbed at Chase the sense of a natural coalition between fine art and illustration. He learned that the English Arts and Crafts movement and Aestheticism had influenced the beginnings of the Golden Age of Illustration, around the time that Modernism staked out its earliest claims in Paris. In other words, illustration was legitimized by the same blue blood coursing through the veins of more prestigious genres of art.

However odd it seems in light of virulent twentieth-century arguments over the proper criteria that would “Make It New” (the art world’s mantra), the early touchstones of Modernism actually inculcated many of the values celebrated by the burgeoning world of illustration. Modernism’s laurel wreath, “flatness,” initially included illustration in its early coronations: the very concept of “flatness” was at first associated with the popular, as the art historian Tim Clark notes. “Flatness” took shape as an antidote to the overelegant, and its successful realization was marked, as Clark points out, by as “plain, workmanlike, and emphatic” a painting, photograph, or poster that could be produced. The prosaic was elevated, so that “loaded brushes and artisans’ combs” became objects of veneration, paradoxically, because they represented good, hard, honest manual labor. Flatness, at the beginning of its fashion among modern artists, celebrated the mass cultural moment, making it a value congenial to illustration.

At the end of the nineteenth century, there were other reasons to consider illustration among the fine arts: Winslow Homer, Edwin Austin Abbey, John La Farge, and the magnificent Howard Pyle were art-school-trained illustrators who helped elevate the status of illustration from a craft to a fine art. As Michele Bogart observes, in the late 1880s “high standards” and “broad appeal” seemed to present no contradiction, in part because access to illustration, as with fine art, was limited to a small segment of the population. But this generation was, essentially, the first and the last to sustain a self-image that comfortably wed their work as illustrators and as easel or mural painters.

Howard Pyle’s legendary talents, his attention to historical authenticity and detail (including his prodigious costume wardrobe for his models), and his ability to render elegant formal compositional values in highly complicated pictures impressed the young Rockwell tremendously. By the time Rockwell had begun his studies at the Chase School, Pyle’s virtuosity was well established: he represented more than anyone illustration’s Golden Age, when the market demand for such work far exceeded what he could provide, even working his seemingly nonstop hours. Pyle’s sense of form, of detail, of color, his organization of space—all these virtues were augmented by the painter’s facility with words as well: he was an accomplished writer of children’s tales.

Like Rockwell, Pyle had been a mediocre student, whose greatest early pleasure had consisted of the monthly arrival of the family’s magazine subscriptions. He would pore over the illustrations, soon busying himself by copying the best drawings—just as Rockwell and his father had done. Pyle’s boyhood years encompassed the Civil War, and he grew up enamored of the battle scenes in
Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
and, later on, the illustrations in British publications. He devoured
Punch
and the
Illustrated London News,
and through all these venues he became acquainted with drawings (usually reproduced from woodcuts) by Whistler, John Millais, Ford Maddox Brown, Holman Hunt, and Winslow Homer. Many of these artists considered their illustrations to be the commercial side to their real art, which was fine painting. But, as an adolescent, Pyle made no distinction. This was, by and large, the art he grew up with.

There was much to recommend Howard Pyle to the young Norman Rockwell, including the leap in talent and ability that Pyle had made during the first five years of his professional work after three years of schooling. His initial attempts are less impressive than the work from Rockwell’s early years, and even after the most important of the children’s magazines,
St. Nicholas,
had accepted a story that he wrote and illustrated, the editors continued expressing disappointment at the poor way that Pyle’s pen drawings held up for reproduction. At
Harper’s,
his illustrations were routinely reworked by the experts Edwin Austin Abbey or Arthur Frost, which demoralized the young artist. Finally, in 1877, when he labored for an extra six weeks over an assignment to convince the editors that he needed no assistance, he achieved a turning point in his career—at the age of twenty-four. Howard Pyle’s story became the exemplar by which Rockwell would measure his own.

In Mamaroneck, the rhythm of Rockwell’s life had increased dramatically, since he now juggled the demands of Chase, high school, and earning money. His energy was up to the challenge; a full schedule, if self-constructed, made the adolescent feel worthwhile. By 1910, at age sixteen, Rockwell believed that Mamaroneck High School drained his energies, distracting him from his real work. Rockwell finally misbehaved badly enough to be kicked out during his sophomore or junior year, according to the first interview he ever gave, seven years later: “I had so much fun at school that I was expelled my second year in high school.” From other pranks he described, such as running the principal’s long underwear up the flagpole, we can assume the mischief was fairly minor. But as the illustrator gained fame, he began to worry that youngsters would emulate his naughtiness and he’d be blamed for a generation of high school miscreants, bad for the teenagers and for his reputation, so he bowdlerized the story and became a high school dropout instead. His high school records (other than grades from his sophomore year) mysteriously disappeared, according to local school officials, ensuring that the cause of his expulsion would remain a secret.

Whatever precipitated his dropout status, Rockwell’s poor grades, even in drawing, and his attempts to win favor by playing the class clown, would probably alert today’s teachers to an attention deficit disorder. Such a syndrome is symptomatic of other high achievers who proved incapable of mastering the protocol of school days: Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein are just a few who suffered from similar afflictions. The years of low self-regard that their school experiences engendered in such men proved resistant even to their future success, and an “agitated depression” expressed in highly focused work compensated—perhaps overcompensated—for their earlier failures. People who suffer from agitated depression, which some experts believe is essentially the adult version of attention deficit disorder, manifest many of the typical signs of depression, while a simultaneous restlessness directs the depression outward, into activities that absorb the excess energy. Rockwell and his mother both appear to have been afflicted with this syndrome, but at least the illustrator was able intuitively to collate his disease with its proper solution: he knew he wanted to become a famous artist, and getting kicked out of school was the quickest way to start the process.

Art school, full-time, was now on his agenda, but his father told him he’d have to pay for it himself. Chase had been everything he needed to get his professional training under way, but everyone knew that real artists had to take a full-time course of study at the venerable National Academy of Design once they became serious about their careers—it was just the thing to do, mainly because the school had been around since the nineteenth century. Founded by Thomas Cole, Rembrandt Peale, and Samuel F. B. Morse, the academic program was modeled on London’s Royal Academy and other great European art academies. Enrolling at the Academy would even make Rockwell eligible to win the yearly contest to study in Rome, the Prix de Rome, the school’s homage to the Académie de France’s own history-painting contest, dating from 1663.

Already earning a fair amount from his paper route and odd jobs but aware he would need to squirrel away more to see himself through the fall semester in Manhattan, Rockwell accepted a summer position at what appeared to be an exclusive local camp. Instead, the enterprise was a scam, run by a greedy fraud who bilked rich parents out of large sums for wildly inadequate childcare. True to the Dickensian grid through which Rockwell viewed the world around him, his adult account of the camp borders on the comically absurd, with the boys and girls eating gruel, Rockwell teaching French (having never even heard the word
oui
), and everyone almost drowning. By the end of the fiasco, Rockwell had discovered he would not get paid; his father, no doubt happier with Jerry’s summer performances in St. Thomas’s theatre group than with Norman’s continuing vagaries, told him he’d have to solve the problem himself. No solution presenting itself, the irritated young man left in the fall for the National Academy of Design far less financially secure than he had anticipated.

Rockwell speaks only of “studying briefly” at the staid institution. School records reveal that Rockwell actually registered for two semesters: fall 1910 and fall 1912. Intriguingly, he was kicked out the first time for failing to complete an assigned painting. Because he did not follow through on tasks he really disliked or disagreed with, we can assume he was contemptuous of the project. His description of what he considered to be arid training smacks of the decay surrounding Miss Havisham in
Great Expectations,
with broken Roman busts and dust-covered marble body parts littering the classroom floors.

He was dismayed, too, at the lack of camaraderie between students and teachers; after all, traditional academic structure had failed to suit his personality, and he had not suffered through those years at Mamaroneck High School only to feel oppressed yet again in the art world. Nor could the location of the school—next door to the dreaded St. John the Divine, which had eaten up much of Rockwell’s boyhood—have contributed positively to the environment. In particular, the plodding means by which students worked their way up the pecking order dismayed the ambitious student. Among Rockwell’s most vivid memories of his brief tenure at the Academy was the rating system that rewarded the week’s best drawings by assigning the winning students numbers that determined who got to pick the model’s pose and where each artist could set up his easel. As a newcomer to the life drawing class, Rockwell fretted over being stuck in a corner, where he saw little more than the female model’s feet and “rather large rear end.”