Norman Rockwell (4 page)

In the late 1940s, for instance, he explained for the benefit of the students he was then teaching that “in a picture which tells a story, the idea itself probably is the most important element of the entire illustration.” For an instructor who insisted on the primary importance of technique, of mastering the principles of traditional draftsmanship and color, this was an illuminating statement. And it is a position that he reiterated over the decades, usually adding wryly, as he did here, that he had always found this the hardest part of his profession—coming up with a good idea. After all, he expounded, it wasn’t enough to come up with something that the artist alone found meaningful; for an illustrator, a narrative idea had to possess near instant recognition for the audience. “Usually I get my best ideas as I shave in the morning,” Rockwell repeated throughout the years. “I draw them on three-by-five squares of paper, then discard them until I get one I think I can go with.”

That crucial next stage—developing a nugget into a narrative gold mine—involved a long associative habit of thinking, free ranging and unlimited in the directions in which it took the artist. He shared with the students enrolled at the Famous Artists’ School an example of this process, in which to begin the sequence he sketched a lamppost, “which always gets me started,” although “where I will end I never know.” Rockwell travels through ten more vignettes before that end point arrives, and, along the way, he plays with a drunken soldier, who morphs into a dutiful one sewing his pants, to a picture of the sailor’s mother mending them instead—with the family dog at hand; to the sailor transformed into a boy who tends to his sick dog, to a vet and dog, to doctors braving blizzards, to a sick girl missing out on a dance, to a square dance, to a cobbler fixing shoes, to a lone cowboy—“shoes recall cowhide, cowhide recalls cows, cows recall cowboys. Still no idea so I must keep going until I finally do get one.” At this point, he stops, assuming that the students get the point.

The clarity of Rockwell’s narrative covers is hard-won, that much is sure. Still, his free-associative method of deriving the thesis surely became second nature to him, given the number of stories he needed to create. And many of those covers tell more stories than one, if only we know where to look. It must have been emotionally costly at times for Rockwell to stir up silt, sift through it, and never stay around long enough to see it settle. But the benefit of such a strategy is clear, too: messy connections that began to surface inconveniently could be put down at once, unexamined further, and remixed later for additional use.

The Art Critic
appears to be just this kind of achievement. In spite of the obvious family dramas played out in the painting, the complex emotions that motivated it were, the sons agree, probably too subterranean to rise to the level of consciousness in the man who welded them into a witty representation instead. “I think the painting is cruel, though my father was not a cruel man,” Jarvis’s youngest brother, Peter Rockwell, states today. Rockwell refused to get bogged down in the depressions he seemed always to hold at bay with more work. Beset by his own anxieties and constant professional comparisons, he often acted out his denials of the tensions in front of him through the “overkill” for which he became famous—the one detail too many, the picture never allowed to be finished, sent off still wet to the
Post,
nonetheless so finely articulated that it looked destined for the ages, not for an ephemeral magazine cover.

Through the supposedly impersonal theme of looking at art,
The Art Critic
rehearses the central love and commitment of Norman Rockwell’s life: his work. In the final cover, a balance has been established among the various acts of viewing, even of over-looking, or voyeurism, that the scene comprises. The young artist and the object of his fascinated study appear to be in a symbiotic relationship of sorts—her flirtatious, welcoming smile is familiar, and his scrutiny proprietary. It is the Dutch Masters to the side who disrupt the relationship between subject and object; theirs is the intervention of those who would dare judge. The painting had as its thematic antecedents works such as
Fireman,
from 1944, in which a distressed, even disgusted firefighter looked down from the inside of the portrait onto a burning cigar left on the bottom of the frame. In Rockwell’s reference to his own carelessness that a year earlier had caused his entire studio to burn to the ground, he raised the notion of authority, of who has the final say when looking at art. In
Man Carrying Frame,
painted two years after
Fireman,
he anticipated his bracketing in
The Art Critic
of an “innocent” whose self-regarding activity takes place between two museum masterpieces, the subjects of which stare out of their own frames in amazement at his presumption. The protagonist in
Man Carrying Frame
actually removes a frame from a painting in such a way that he ends up looking framed himself.

As the art historian Michael Fried points out in
Absorption and Theatricality,
painting that calls attention to itself, a common theme of the seventeenth century, became a staple of Modernism as a means of talking about art. Rockwell’s interest in self-reference was grounded only partially in philosophical questions about looking, being looked at, and the painter’s relationship to his audience, especially pertinent as those ideas were for someone whose artistic mainstay was producing covers for
The Saturday Evening Post.
His less theoretical text in the pictures about pictures spoke to the need for tolerance, for capaciousness, for an awareness that as soon as we judge others, we will find ourselves coming up short as well. In the end, Rockwell’s paintings about painting remind us that to presume superiority is to risk inevitable comeuppance oneself; that the act of seeing outside the frame must allow for difference. From this perspective, it is no stretch to see two paintings as disparate on most levels as
The Art Critic
and the 1960s civil rights piece,
The Problem We All Live With,
as sharing a common concern.

That Rockwell would sometimes draw from the murky regions of his unconscious to engender his covers is surely, upon reflection, no surprise. Most artists work on a very limited number of images at one time, as opposed to complete narratives that must stand on their own. Rockwell confronted a major challenge in inventing so many stories for the
Post
covers. Only months before he began
The Art Critic,
for instance, he painted the hauntingly beautiful
Breaking Home Ties,
which was published as the September 25, 1954,
Post
cover. The recent efforts of just about the entire Rockwell household to move away—including Mary’s frequent trips to the Riggs psychiatric institution—were mimed in this bittersweet representation of father and son taking their leave of each other. Family connections—and their breaking—were much on Rockwell’s mind in those days. And they had been for the past three years, since Mary had suggested that they divorce as a remedy for her unhappiness—Rockwell’s second wife to seek this solution.

Such themes accommodated thoughts that lay too deep for tears, to borrow from another Romantic poet of the quotidian, William Wordsworth.
The Art Critic
rehearsed the intertwined, emotionally fraught motivations that had funded Norman Rockwell’s career; and it reminded him that familial traits underwrote his right to such a destiny, much as he assumed was true for his eldest son. Markers from several generations had indicated to the illustrator even before he learned to write that art could be his way to compete among men. If painterly talent had not inspired emotional closeness among his relatives, it had funded much of the family pride in achievement, especially on his mother’s side. Even the connection he shared with his own rather browbeaten father, lacking as it was, came through their early shared love of telling stories through the pen and palette. Art and family, painting and love, loss and renewal: not the conventional dialogue of an illustrator. But for Norman Rockwell, they were the very substance of his life and his career.

2

Family Ties That Bind

Two Thomas Hills, born in England during the late 1820s, unrelated except by such coincidence, similarly staked out their futures in the New World: they were artists intent on specializing in landscapes, portraits, and even animal paintings. Both would produce artist sons named Thomas Hill as well, and the confluence of names and professions would engender confusion up to the present day. But in the mid-1860s, just as the more hapless of the shared-name patriarchs immigrated to the United States, the other and more fortunate senior Hill, who had already lived in Massachusetts for more than ten years, decided to go west. There he would become a highly successful, respected landscape painter, joining Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran among artists renowned for their aesthetic mastery of the American wilderness. Our newly arrived Thomas Hill, never as lucky in the fine arts as his talent probably deserved, would soon dig his heels into Yankee soil and paint portraits of beloved neighborhood animals one day, the peeling clapboard walls of neighborhood houses the next. His descendants would joke that his masterpiece legacy was his grandson, the heir whose domestic genre paintings would give voice to Middle America’s unarticulated yearnings better than the other successful Hill’s homage to the western sublime ever did.

Given the option, Norman Rockwell would probably have been ambivalent about which Thomas Hill to choose for his grandfather. Without a doubt, the great western painter would have anchored his progeny to a more elegant pedigree, worthy of envy even by that magnificent illustrator of the West, N. C. Wyeth. But Rockwell’s delight in the presence of well-meaning if larger-than-life men; his love of a good prank and his sly pleasure at the ribald suggestion; and his vivid rootedness in all things northeastern legitimize as an equally appropriate forebear the colorful, various, ill-behaved extrovert, Thomas Howard Hill.

Rockwell’s grandfather, fated to be the Thomas Hill that history forgot, sailed to America in the early 1860s, settling for the first few years in Hoboken, New Jersey, where his mother and father, Susannah and Thomas, had immigrated earlier. Hopeful that the career he had barely taken up in England would bear fruit in the new land, Thomas Hill, Jr., tried for several years to support his family by plying his art. But by 1866, the local directory reflects an adjustment in Hill’s expectations; his job, previously listed as “artist,” changes now to “painter”—of houses—matching the description of his father’s career. For reasons unclear, in 1867 or 1868, the peripatetic painter chose to relocate his family and his parents to Yonkers, New York, where he would begin to call himself by his middle name, Howard; city records reveal at least six Thomas Hills in Yonkers alone, and Thomas Howard Hill, however absurd his self-assessment, always liked to think of himself as distinguished.

Although family anecdotes reveal a restlessness on Hill’s part that sought relief in frequent moves, his English wife, Anne Elizabeth Patmore, the three children they’d brought with them from London, and the two born subsequent to the family’s immigration prevailed in their wish to retain Yonkers as their home base, the town where they had ended up burying Hill’s mother soon after their relocation. Regardless of the comings and goings of their head of household, the rest of the family sought psychological as well as physical stability. The descendants bequeathed the nation by Anne and Howard Hill would, within two generations, disperse around the country in typical immigrant fashion, but their identity as Americans was rooted in one of the first suburbs of New York City.

Both of his Hill grandparents were dead before Norman Rockwell was born. Depending on whose account and which calculation you accept, Anne and Howard Hill produced four daughters, Susan, Kate, Amy Elizabeth, and Anne Mary, and two sons, Percevel and Thomas Jr. Still, mid-nineteenth-century American mores supported a strong tradition of taking in the orphaned children of one’s siblings, cousins, and in-laws and raising them as one’s own, and the Hills were generous in this regard. Throughout the years, the size of their household ranged from six to thirteen children, variations that account for Rockwell’s claim that his mother was one of twelve siblings.

Anne Elizabeth Patmore Hill claimed royal ancestry on both sides of the family for her large brood, often citing her sister’s marriage to Captain Norman Spencer Perceval as the maternal evidence. According to family lore, in 1605 Captain Perceval’s grandfather encountered Guy Fawkes, the instigator of Catholic insurrection, in the House of Commons, whereupon he promptly pushed the rebel down the stairs. Furthermore, Anne explained, Howard Hill was a direct descendant of Lady Elizabeth Howard, whose name was the source of his own. Finally, the proud Mrs. Hill confided, Howard Hill’s original surname was Jenkin, a link to another royal family; but his early bad temper had caused him to be adopted by an aunt named Hill, whose name he then assumed. Vague family connections had led Thomas Howard Hill to sing a solo for Her Majesty when he was a child, while Anne herself, when a young lady, had been presented at Queen Victoria’s court.

However illustrious her ancestors might have been, Anne Elizabeth Hill’s life with her husband was hardly queenly. Experiencing living conditions that varied radically year to year, and bearing and caring for many children while at the whim of her artist husband’s moods, Mrs. Hill was given little opportunity even to dream of her old life. By turns generating periods of prosperity and poverty, Thomas Howard Hill haphazardly earned his living by selling a painting, resting a while on those laurels, then seeking housepainting under assumed names when the family had completely run out of resources. When he painted seriously, the results were more than competent renderings of usually outdoor scenes, typically alternating between the landscapes and animal pictures that were endemic to the popular tastes of the time. He exercised extreme attention to the brushstroke, using clear, small, carefully controlled motions, a quality that, Rockwell would later jest, must have been passed along the bloodline. New York City’s prestigious National Academy of Design hung four of Hill’s paintings in its 1865 exhibition:
The Warblers, Babes in the Woods, Winter Scene,
and
Three Chicks.
Two were accepted the following year as well:
Rural Felicity
and
Haunt of the Partridge.
During this period, the yearly National Academy shows functioned as the private American equivalent of the annual state-sponsored salon exhibitions in Paris.

Hill, who had arrived in the States with real hopes of adding his name to the Hudson River School, did achieve a modicum of artistic respectability through several commercial commissions, and at least two prominent Manhattan hotels—the Murray Hill and the Union Square—owned several of his paintings. But what Rockwell remembered most about his grandfather’s talent was that he squandered it.

Recklessness as well as restlessness inhabited the heart of the artist-patriarch. As Howard Hill cobbled together a family life of plenty that was in danger of being supplanted by a complete reversal of fortune at any moment, uncertainty became the only constant of the Hill household. With a Yonkers boardinghouse for their home, the first-generation Americans grew up not knowing whether the week would rain down the rich array of clothes and culinary treats from Manhattan typical of a particularly lucrative painting commission, or if they’d be divvying up a dozen pairs of identical shoes, all the same size, that their father, in the aftermath of a drunken night of despair, had bought for next to nothing off the street.

The joie de vivre that Howard Hill manifested led his eldest son to follow his romantic lead. In 1875, Tom Hill daringly sailed to Mexico and Cuba on a boat that carried both passengers and cargo loaded along the journey. His diary tells of adventures ranging from hurricanes to government insurrections, where, as two boats braced to battle, he “hoped to see blood flow.” Tom’s importance as the oldest son comes through in the letters he sends and receives during the trip. His interest in the “children” left behind—his two youngest siblings, nine-year-old Nancy and the baby, Percevel—is keen, and the older girls, his sisters Amy, Kate, and Susie, take pains to keep him up-to-date on their little brother “Percy” especially. Their letters to him center on church and Sunday school; the entire family, except for Howard Hill, was deeply religious, and Tom’s diary records the hours that he spent reading his Bible every Sunday. Most significant, the sisters’ correspondence reveals that he was probably his mother’s favorite, and that his relationship with his father was at best vexed. “Father misses you and often talks very kindly of you, he feels your absents [
sic
] very much. . . . he has quite surprised us by thinking so much about you,” his sister Susie earnestly informs him. She wistfully alludes to the young man’s cheerful nature: “We all miss you very much every time a boy goes by in the evening whistling we think it is you.” Tom, in return, writes mostly of the head winds and the sharks that he encounters, but he does add thoughtful bits about the gifts such as tortoiseshell combs he is bringing home for the girls.

Judging from the weary, often inarticulate communication that the apparently uneducated Mrs. Hill sent to her Mexico-bound son in 1875, she carefully marshaled her energies to run her household and contribute to the church, the latter ranking higher in her order of commitments than the former. Family anecdotes about Howard Hill’s irrational behavior during days of drunken rampages reflect communal amusement at the wildly incongruous accusations of infidelity he would level against his devout and devoted wife and dismay at the suffering his erratic actions caused her. From the few surviving pictures of Norman Rockwell’s maternal grandmother, Anne Hill was a perpetually tired, anxious woman. The face that peers cautiously out of one photograph from the early 1880s seems fine-tuned into a permanent tension—perhaps an alert apprehension ready to defend against Howard’s periodic tirades.

But she did adore her husband, and she must have appreciated that a life of adventure was in the cards for his sons, at least from the way she accepted with equanimity Tom’s daring ventures. Although he had been coughing up blood and running high fevers for years, Tom believed that the fresh air would serve him well, and he continued to sail any chance he could get, fatiguing himself in the process. In between his forays into the sea, he pursued a career as an artist, admirably earning enough through easel sales and design work to support himself comfortably, although his flat, childish representations of kittens and butterflies evince little evidence of his father’s technical skill.

Nonetheless, the young man gained a fairly substantial local reputation for himself so that he was able to rent a studio at 40 Warburton Street, where he taught drawing and painting. By the beginning of 1884, Alexander Smith’s carpet works in Yonkers, a major producer of high-quality rugs, had hired him as one of their many designers. On November 18 of that same year, armed with a good salary and dashing looks, Tom married Lallie Newlin from Elizabeth, New Jersey. According to nineteenth-century church records, Lallie’s uncle, the Reverend Richard Newlin, performed the ceremony at the Hills’ parish church, St. Paul’s. The wedding invitations were elegant and expensive; Tom’s marriage to someone of good family suggests he had trustworthy prospects, as well as a religious pedigree.

But if even one member of the Hill family was able to enjoy this wedding with equanimity, such pleasure would have been a triumph of hope over every probable cause to despair of the couple living happily ever after. Only six months earlier, Tom’s older sister Amy and her husband, Harold Milner, had died of consumption, leaving their three young children, John, Eva, and Amy, to be shuffled among family members. The irritating cough that had become both Tom’s and his mother’s inconstant companion must have sounded ominously like an insistent murmur: proceed with caution.

But Tom and Lallie decided that his frequent fevers and occasional bloody sputum were just constitutional weaknesses, and on November 25, 1886, the Hills had a baby. “Harold” probably spent little time in his grandmother Hill’s arms, since by his birth, she had begun suffering from lung congestion that left her breathless after the slightest exertion. When her new grandson was three months old, Anne Elizabeth Hill died—within a few weeks of the consumptive death of her two-year-old grandson by her daughter Susie.

Perhaps as a partial effort to regain his naturally optimistic nature, and probably as a supposed fresh-air curative for his respiratory illness, four months after he had helped bury his mother and nephew, Tom Hill set out to sail around Manhattan. He ran into a terrible summer storm that dashed ships and waterfront property to pieces. Two weeks after that flirtation with disaster, and determined to enjoy more domestic pleasures, Tom took his wife and baby to Coney Island. Within hours of their arrival, Tom began hemorrhaging from the throat. The next day he was dead.

Obituaries for the twenty-nine-year-old new father emphasized how he had already positioned himself within the Yonkers community, no doubt largely through the easy affability he had copied from his father’s habits outside the home: “He was genial and amiable by nature, and made friends of all who knew him.” Another local paper praised him for being “a genial, whole-souled, unpretentious gentleman.” Furthermore, “Mr. Hill had resided here so long and was so well and favorably known for his many excellent qualities as a man, and his abilities as an artist . . . that his death in early manhood seemed doubly sad.” For Tom’s little sister Nancy, the sadness was compounded by the wide swath that consumption, as tuberculosis was poetically but appropriately called at the time, cut in her family’s midst that year. She couldn’t know who would be next to die; and alongside her grief, she had to wonder about her own mortality.