Norman Rockwell (50 page)

Occasionally, his attempts to help his relatives backfired financially. He had learned not to expect loans to be repaid in full; already, he had written off not only part of a loan Jim Edgerton had been unable to pay back, but the entire amount that Nancy Wynkoop, Mary’s sister, had incurred when her husband’s business had problems. Nonetheless, late in her life, when discussing her brother-in-law’s personality, Nancy bristled at what she considered his brush-off when a fire destroyed her family’s house and Rockwell helped them financially, but gave her the feeling, she said, “that he didn’t like poor relatives.” More likely, given the accounts in the artist’s ledgers and the discretion with which he did people favors, he was feeling particularly overextended when approached again by the Wynkoops, and he felt unable to say no to them, though Nancy’s husband had defaulted on loan notes that Rockwell then assumed. When his own brother’s son wrote him for help, he sent John Rockwell the requested funds, but he wrote Jerry, still living in Kane, Pennsylvania, asking him to assume a loan note on John’s behalf.

Jerry Rockwell had not mellowed with age, and his treatment of his children merely echoed his lifelong petty nastiness toward his brother. Family tales of the toy designer’s behavior to his sons as they grew up, when he punished their infractions, for instance, by confining the offender to his room for the entire summer and leaving his food on a tray outside the bedroom door, meshed with Rockwell’s own rueful stories about being bullied by his older brother—including, according to Jarvis Rockwell, an especially memorable occasion when Jerry threw Norman out of a second-story window.

Now, on reading of Norman’s assistance as well as his hope that Jerry would assume the loan note, the aggrieved man dashed off an angry letter, accusing his brother of undermining him. He knew Norman had helped his son Dick earlier, he wrote, and he wanted to stress that it was no favor to the boys to show up their own father like this. Surely his sons could work out their own problems, as he and Carol had after the 1929 crash. In any event, he could not and would not assume the note, but, he added confusingly at the end, he hoped Rockwell could do whatever he could to help his nephew, Jarvis’s son.

Jarvis’s reference in the aggressive letter to Rockwell as the “rich uncle” must have hit a particularly sore spot, given the tight financial situation Rockwell constantly found himself in, as he supported a multitude of relatives in addition to his own household expenses. As always, however, unless he felt there was a moral conflict, he swallowed the bile and took care of John Rockwell. But he did then write to one of his cousins in Rhode Island who had tended Nancy Rockwell and asked if the man’s father, Jack Orpen, could get along without the weekly money Rockwell had been sending him, partly because his business was in trouble. Rockwell gently explained that he was having financial worries of his own, and that if there was any way Jack could do without his help, it would be good to know. “I think you know how happy it has made me to be able to send the amount I have each week to Jack,” he kindly says. “But in all honesty it is becoming more and more questionable whether I can continue to indefinitely do so.” Because of his rising household expenses, he explains, he is “working harder than I ever did before, and still I have a time working everything out. So I am trying to retrench wherever I can, and quite naturally I think, the thought arises that perhaps your folks could get through alright without my help.” Monthly ledgers several years later reflect that Rockwell continued sending the assistance through the end of the decade, at least.

The artist’s slightly defensive diction—“and quite naturally I think”—betrays the discomfort he feels at having to ask for permission to withdraw his charity. In spite of his generous support of whatever relatives seemed to ask, he assumed some primal sense of responsibility for them, even when he himself was in difficulty. It is difficult to figure out exactly why he accepted, apparently without conflict, the responsibility to provide for distant relatives and for nephews he rarely saw. Seeing his actions as recompense for guilt at making so much money is one way to view the largesse. But people who knew Rockwell up close think that this private generosity was a deeply ingrained part of his personality and part of his general affection for people. He simply believed in people helping others whenever they could. Jack’s daughter, Mary Amy Orpen, never realized the extent of Rockwell’s assistance to his extended family; she was aware of cousin Norman putting her through Pratt, including buying her all the best art supplies she could find, but she didn’t realize that he was supporting her parents as well as his mother at the same time.

And unspoken in Rockwell’s letter to Jack Orpen, as if such bluntness would be rude, is the reality that most of the money the artist had sent the Orpens was meant to compensate for their tending to Nancy Rockwell, whom her son supported with monthly checks as well. During the late summer of the previous year, Nancy Rockwell, age eighty-four, had died. The last few months of her life, she was a victim of a mild dementia that hardly seemed to affect her personality but that had necessitated her move to a nursing home in Providence. The cousins arranged for her funeral to be conducted by a relative of Samuel Orpen, Nancy’s brother-in-law, the Episcopal priest who had married her and Waring more than sixty years earlier. Rockwell himself arranged for a special funeral car on a train headed for New York, which he paid to stop in Yonkers for his mother’s coffin to be transported to St. John’s cemetery, where she would be buried in the family plot beside Waring.
The New York Times
gave the complicated woman an impressively long obituary, given her anonymity—except as the mother of Norman Rockwell.

Inevitably, in light of how his art helped him to process his emotions, once his mother’s death had time to sink in, Rockwell would create covers whose theme dealt with loosening intimate bonds. During the following year, the subject had reverberated deeply enough that he had plenty of psychological material out of which to create powerful paintings. Throughout the summer of 1954, he worked on two significant
Post
covers,
Breaking Home Ties
and
The Art Critic.
The first, published on September 25, 1954, showed a dressed up, college-bound young man waiting eagerly for the train, his tired farmer father hunched over beside him. A collie rests its head on the boy’s knee. Even though the facial expressions of both characters are broadly rendered, the painting is one of a small group of fifties realist pieces that exceed almost all the rest of Rockwell’s oeuvre. The boy looks unable to contain his excitement over leaving, however much he would prefer to be tactful; the older man appears unable to say anything meaningful, in spite of the emotions conveyed even in the drag of his cigarette.

Rockwell readily admitted in later years that the dispersal of his own family at this point inspired this painting, and in the same breath, he explained that he painted the dog to symbolize what the father was unable to say.
Breaking Home Ties
appears indebted to Dean Cornwell’s series of biblical paintings that Rockwell had long praised, both in color tones and composition. The gold, amber, brown, and scarlet colors of Cornwell’s 1928
Christ and the Woman at the Well
are reproduced here, and the seated father, hunched slightly forward as he confronts his son’s departure, appears directly modeled on Cornwell’s Christ, seated at the bench. Even the formal weight of the otherwise centered composition shifts slightly to the right because of the dog’s presence, just as the passersby in Cornwell’s painting shift his pictorial plane to the same side.

Such reference to a religious series whose romantic execution Rockwell had admired suggests, whether consciously or not, that the illustrator struggled with the exits his sons were making, and the scary challenge of starting life anew, in Stockbridge, with only Mary. His willingness to move for her treatment was a sign of his own developing awareness that he played no small part in her troubles, and he did not flinch, whatever image the American people maintained of him as patriarch of the perfect and happy family they all desired, from aggressively seeking help for her and for himself. But his life was unfolding in ways that were far afield from any of the ideal pictures he had created for himself of what happiness looked like.

At the end of the summer, before Jerry went off to Boston, Rockwell painted a cover that was just as close to home, and even less accessible to superficial interpretation.
The Art Critic,
not finished until months later and published only in April the following year, embarrassed his son, and possibly, from Jerry’s recollection, distressed the artist’s wife, but Rockwell never discussed with his family the personal context for the painting. Rockwell’s artist son posed for the smug young critic caught staring at the décolletage on prominent display in the portrait he was supposed to be studying. When he saw the finished painting, Mary Rockwell’s son was not impressed: “I was disgusted by the painting, because I was looking at a bosom, which my mother had posed for, and my father knew that I knew.”

The woman whom the student subjects to his magnifying glass combines Rockwell’s photographs of his wife with two other sources: Frans Hals’s
Portrait of a Woman,
from 1634, and Peter Paul Rubens’s sketch of his first wife, Isabella Brant, around 1610. As his own painting evolved, Rockwell had struggled to define the appropriate female personification: the gamut ran from the classically pretty to the charmlessly mundane. As the picture develops, the woman is first caricatured as comically overreacting to the young man’s rude stare. Although she becomes more conventionally attractive, her disapproving reaction to the student’s scrutiny, instead of her beauty, dominates the picture. In her final incarnation, however, she appears knowing and flirtatious instead, amused at being visually stalked by the prematurely jaded “art critic.”

The Art Critic
even extended beyond the immediate family struggles it invoked, from the eldest son’s following in his father’s footsteps and sometimes seeming to know it all, to the confused sense of where Mary Rockwell’s deepest loyalties lay—to her husband or her son?—to the institutional stature of Rockwell’s own long career. Although to Jarvis, the most fraught interplay occurs between the young man and the object of his gaze—the portrait of a flirtatious woman—Rockwell was plumbing his own complicated family background even more deeply. A stockpile of sketches makes it clear that he spent enormous energy deciding which Old Master painting to hang on the wall to the right of the student critic, and he kept alternating between a Dutch landscape and a group portrait. By this time, enough press references had linked Rockwell to the Dutch School that he was in danger of revealing too much to his public and to himself about the motivations behind his supposedly “universal,” nonsolipsistic painting, as his works were always assumed to be. Now he shrewdly avoided the need to confront the personal history embedded (if only unconsciously) in
The Art Critic
by eschewing Dutch genre painting, the field most closely tied with his own professional development through the years.

To complicate the reference to ancestry, artistic or otherwise, Rockwell wedded two highly influential Dutch paintings in his final group portrait occupying the position of sentinels over the scene. To the right of the student, three appalled Dutch elders almost jump out of the frame in their astonishment at the upstart’s impudence. The painting is a parody of Frans Hals’s 1616 group portrait
The Company of Saint George’s Militia
and Rembrandt’s even more famous 1662
The Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild.
Art students—one of the subjects of the painting—would have immediately recognized the predecessors inspiring Rockwell’s fake masterpiece, since the famous Dutch group portraits were prominently studied in art school. And the history of both portraits was taught as well, including the cultural symbolism of hierarchy and judgment that the paintings carried. Hals’s work reflected an officer banquet where rank is observed through seating, while Rembrandt’s painting narrated the pronouncements of the cloth guild on the dry goods brought to them for acceptance or rejection.
The Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild,
with its ready-made reference to Rockwell’s own father and the proud paternal profession of George Wood and Sons, was frequently lauded for its near perfect formal composition and arrangement of space. George Horace Lorimer had hung an oversized copy of the painting on the wall to the right of his desk; the Syndics stared in judgment at Rockwell every time he visited the Boss to audition his ideas. Rockwell, who also prominently displayed a reproduction of
The Syndics
in his New Rochelle studio during the 1920s, makes it his own in
The Art Critic
by appropriating Rembrandt’s lesser-known preliminary sketch of only three judges instead of the six shown in the finished portrait.

At the time that Rockwell was working on
The Art Critic,
Erik Erikson sent a handwritten note on his behalf to Mary Rockwell’s therapist, Dr. Knight. He told Knight that, speaking for his client, he felt it imperative that Rockwell take a vacation to Europe that fall, a trip proposed by his son’s fiancée’s parents, which neither Rockwell nor the other couple wanted upended by Mary’s presence. Rockwell was very depressed, and at the point of suicidal ideas, behind which lay the realization that Mary would probably never be well enough to live with as a reasonable person, nor sick enough to reside in an institution. Instead, Rockwell would spend the rest of his life trying to help her and to compensate for her illness.

Erikson explains that Mary has insisted to her husband, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that she can make the trip sufficiently; in fact, she has suggested that she could semi-officially represent Riggs by checking into Kessell Hospital in England when they reach that country. With the boys all leaving the house at the end of the summer, the timing for her to be left home alone is poor, she has pointed out. Erikson notes that while this is true, Rockwell is struggling with the same adjustment to missing his children. The analyst ends by imploring Knight to see what he can do to ensure that Erikson’s client gets this vacation that he desperately needs.