Norman Rockwell (5 page)

Nor had the solicitous attention paid to Tom Hill throughout his long bout with tuberculosis escaped his sister, who appropriated the theme of suffering for the rest of her life as a way to be recognized. Born on March 6, 1866, in Hoboken, New Jersey, Nancy—or Anne Mary, until she began using her nickname—was the youngest girl in the Hill brood, and she learned early to whine effectively and often in order to gain attention from her volatile household. Countervailing such self-pity, however, was the love of adventure she shared with her father and her brother Tom. Although, for the most part, Nancy’s spiritedness assumed the conventionally feminine form of fantasy life—living through magazines, books, and tales told in church by missionaries—the otherwise pious daughter of the even more religious Anne Elizabeth Hill would encourage in her own children an openness to excitement, reserving her highest praise for accomplishments that marked her sons as intrepid men of the world, like her brother and her father before them. She could be an invalid; they would be the outlet for her needs that went otherwise unaddressed.

Whatever emotions were stirred by her masculine but gentle brother’s death, Nancy Hill registered its impact most tellingly by becoming engaged, the year Tom died, to a man who bore a striking physical resemblance to him. And she implied the values she held dear in a man through her choice of a husband whose character contrasted completely with the frivolous father she was said to detest.

In later years, though her sisters granted more weight to Howard Hill’s charm than to the chaos he created, Nancy could only repeat darkly that he was a “street angel and a house devil.” If his name emerged in family conversation, she railed against his drunkenness. Nancy’s great-niece, Mary Amy Orpen, admits that “enough people in the room always agreed with her assessment that I guess she must have been on target.” Norman Rockwell assumed instead that Nancy’s demanding personality led her to judge her father too harshly. Typical of a tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to characters whose peccadilloes struck him as harmless, Rockwell emphasized in his family accounts that he’d heard that Howard Hill wasn’t really so bad. He tended to discount his mother’s opinions as self-interested anyway, and so thought Nancy was probably being typically unfair in her condemnation. In truth, the public conviction that poverty bred consumption led to the Hill family’s deep sense of humiliation at being silently stigmatized as consumptives, and Nancy Hill associated her father’s failure to earn a decent living with the shame-filled death her closest relatives had endured.

She was proud, however, of the artistic lineage she felt she had inherited, and that she exhibited primarily through the elaborate embroidery designs she created for her family and for church functions. And she enjoyed sharing with her own children the childhood anecdote about Howard Hill lining up his eight or nine (depending on who was at home) progeny along a stair-rail or kitchen table, where he then passed a painting in progress along their paths, each girl or boy tasked with a particular assignment: one might have been taught to paint a certain kind of stump, one to shade leaves. Nancy was asked to perfect the moon as her contribution to such “potboilers,” as Norman later called them. Hardly the first artist to use his children to fill in the less important moments on his canvas, Hill nonetheless ingeniously engineered an aesthetic production line.

On March 7, 1888, at age sixty-five, Howard Hill, having outlived his wife by two years, died of what the newspapers called an “epileptic fit” at the Yonkers boardinghouse where the widower lodged. Medical examiners called it heart failure. Whether the convulsion was brought on by a high fever from the tuberculosis he may well have shared with his son and wife was not noted; St. Paul’s registry of funerals also records Hill’s cause of death as heart failure, though the church sometimes substituted that vague phrase for less attractive possibilities. Given the contrast between the registry’s multitude of references to his wife’s and children’s attendance at church functions and the complete absence of any mention of Howard Hill, Hill’s funeral might well have been the only time the painter made it to church. In his obituary, the local paper declared him “an artistic painter by profession, [whose] abilities brought him considerable reputation.” Over one hundred years later, Hill’s paintings infrequently would show up for auction at Sotheby’s and Christie’s; and, by the turn of the next century, those few collectors interested in his work could find three landscapes available at Florida and New York galleries, ranging in price from $4,000 to $20,000. The dealers did not realize that Thomas Howard Hill was Norman Rockwell’s grandfather; indeed, the only name connection that has inflated Hill’s prices has been the periodic, ever-present confusion with “the” Thomas Hill.

Although Howard Hill would be dead before his grandson was born, he lived on emphatically in the daughter who held him in contempt, Norman Rockwell’s mother. Nancy Hill had grown into a petite woman who, in spite of her ladylike ways, was a “real character,” as Mary Amy Orpen chuckles. “Yes, she acted like she hated her father, saying he was a bum, but she was so colorful herself, it’s hard not to think she was deeply influenced by him.” If the five-foot-two-inch-tall woman raged against her father’s outrageous behavior, she was no stranger to such extremes herself. By the age of twenty-two, around the time she moved in with her married sister, Susan Hill Orpen, Nancy Hill had developed into a complicated young adult. Often extraordinarily demanding—“she got what she wanted”—she was soft and decoratively feminine, strong-willed and active, victimized and anxious. She also suffered from depression, what she and others called her “nerves.” As she aged, she regaled visitors with stories of her miserable childhood, or, depending on her mood, entertained them by pulling out the fur collar her mother had worn to be presented at court. More than one person believed her to be very lucky to find a man like Waring Rockwell to make of her his almost pet.

Professions of English blue blood aside, Nancy Hill’s family did not come close to enjoying the prestigious pedigree of the one she married into. A genealogist who has thoroughly researched the Rockwell family tree reflects, “It’s almost as if Norman Rockwell had been created to represent America—it’s amazing how many towns have a Rockwell as their founder.” If historian David Hackett Fischer is correct to claim that of the four major English migrations to the United States, the first wave of Puritans to reach the American shores in the 1630s and ’40s encapsulated the values of what would become the American standard, then the country could do worse than anoint Rockwell its representative. “A people of substance, character, and deep personal piety,” the initial immigrant tide was remarkably homogenous compared to the groups that followed. These early pioneers traveled in family units, typically with “exceptionally literate, highly skilled, and heavily urban” heads of household. This Yankee strand, with its potent mixture of tolerance, liberality, emotional distance, and judicial standards, with its Abrahams and Rachels and Jonathans who pushed their way across Connecticut and Massachusetts, finally stopping in New York, would brand America, for better and worse, with habits of mind and body that triumphed as the substance of a democracy.

And in 1862, even as Thomas Howard and Anne Elizabeth Hill arranged their passages to the United States of America, John William Rockwell and Phoebe Boyce Waring, both of Yonkers, New York, were on the verge of combining two great Yankee families through their marriage.

John Rockwell’s father and mother—Norman’s great-grandparents—were Samuel and Oril Sherman Rockwell. Born in 1810 to well-to-do farmers in Ridgebury, Connecticut, “whose Christian fidelity made a happy home,” according to a history of Westchester County, Samuel was apprenticed when he was fifteen years old to a watchmaker and jeweler in Manhattan. After twelve years of applying “more than ordinary natural aptitude for the business,” the twenty-seven-year-old man bought the modest establishment and developed it into a “flourishing and profitable business.” In 1844, Samuel built a modest cottage on a plot of land he bought in Yonkers, and the next year he converted the little house into the family homestead and began traveling back and forth each morning and night to his job in Manhattan. Until the Hudson River Railway was built, he took a horse-drawn carriage along what was then called Harlem Road, becoming one of Yonkers’s first daily commuters.

The original small cottage evolved into a “fine country seat” before long, and Samuel Rockwell worked so hard that he was soon able to sell his watch shop in “the crowded city” of New York to establish a real estate business in the “pure air” of Yonkers, which at this point contained only three thousand inhabitants. He cofounded the Yonkers Savings Bank and helped organize the first Presbyterian church in the community. Known as a man of “enlarged views,” Samuel Rockwell was deemed by a late-nineteenth-century historian of Westchester County to hold the best possible claim “to be considered a representative man of the city.”

Samuel was proud of his New England heritage, the lineage and traditions of which he sought to pass down through his children: Samuel Sherman (who died at the age of four), John William (Norman Rockwell’s grandfather), George Sigourney, Frances Elizabeth, and Julius Talcott. He named his second son, born in 1838, after the covey of sixteenth-century John Rockwells who were among the early wave of Pilgrims first settled in Hartford, Connecticut. Born in Somerset, England, in 1588, John Rockwell and his wife, Wilmet Cade, had seeded the Rockwell lineage in the New World through their son and daughter, John and Mary. By 1703, when John’s son Jonathan married a Ridgefield country girl, Abigail Canfield, the Rockwells were sufficiently well established that three years later Jonathan could pack up his loom and head west with his wife to help her family develop their land. Predictably, the relocated Rockwells were successful with their farming and weaving, which their son Abraham and his wife Esther Riggs continued to expand. By the time that Abraham and Esther’s firstborn, Runa Rockwell, and his wife, Rachel Darling, were rearing the son who would establish the Rockwell presence in New York—Samuel Darling Rockwell—the town of Ridgebury, Connecticut, had been inhabited by Rockwells for more than 150 years. And at least a few Rockwell boys fought in 1779 against Benedict Arnold’s troops, who tried to burn down Ridgebury and Danbury in their attempt to stem the American Revolution.

Most important of the traditions that Norman Rockwell would absorb from his own father was the ancestral assumption that the son should model his character on his male parent—with the corollary that the parent was supposed to earn such emulation. Runa Rockwell had patterned himself upon what archival family records call Abraham’s “habits of industry and frugality,” the example of which enabled the weaver and part-time farmer not only to provide well for his own family but to contribute heavily to the local “cause of Religion” and to the needy in the community. “The good will and respect of his townsmen” that this type of behavior had won for his forebears, proudly noted in the old histories of the Rockwell family, were not lost on Samuel Rockwell, who earned great admiration in Yonkers, largely due to a lifetime of steady, reliable labor.

Samuel’s son John only increased his family’s pride in its American lineage when he married Phoebe Boyce Waring, who brought her own dowry of Yonkers nobility to their union. Born in 1841, Phoebe came from an English family that had left Liverpool with the great wave of early-seventeenth-century religious refugees who migrated to Norwalk, Connecticut. A New York contingent was led by Phoebe’s great-grandfather, John Waring, who by the next century had made his way to Yonkers, where his offspring—twelve grandchildren produced by Waring’s fourth child, Peter—would convert the country town into a center of industry. Peter’s son William initiated the brothers’ string of successes when he rented an old gristmill in order to start up a small hat manufacturing company, restructured in 1834 because his family and Yonkers’s prominent Paddock clan decided to unite in marriage and in business. Another of Peter’s children, Aurelia Waring, wed Isaac Paddock, and “Paddock and Waring” would expand for the next decade, until, in 1844, the buildings burned to the ground.

Although the reconstruction took several years, by 1857 it was a thriving small business again, and Peter’s son John T. Waring, who had worked with his brother William for the ten years prior to the fire, bought the entire factory and enlarged it until it employed over eight hundred men to make ninety-six hundred hats a day. In 1861, Phoebe’s uncle John was elected president of Yonkers, while the next year, her uncle William cofounded Underhill and Waring molasses house, the town’s first sugar refinery. By 1868, John T. Waring was rich enough to buy the buildings that Robert Getty, one of the wealthiest businessmen in Yonkers, had constructed on the corner of Main Street and Broadway, and within eight more years, John’s capital would grow to almost a million dollars. But during the previous decade, lulled into a false sense of security because of his company’s unprecedented success, Phoebe’s uncle had bought thirty-three acres of land on North Broadway overlooking the Hudson River, where he erected a magnificent mansion known as “Greystone.” When sudden reverses in his business caused him to lose everything the same year that he gained his first million dollars, he went bankrupt and ended up selling Greystone for a tenth of what it had cost to build.

More impressive than John T. Waring’s earlier success, however, was the courageous way in which he handled the severe setback, and the generosity with which the community welcomed him home rather than censuring his failure. Waring moved to Boston, hired convicts to help him build his business anew, and, triumphant, returned to Yonkers in 1884, where he set to work reconstructing his hat industry. Phoebe’s own father, Jarvis Augustus Waring, himself a respected local businessman until he died in 1872, through his can-do work ethic inspired among his descendants, John T. included, the belief that failure was ignoble only if its victims refused to seek success anew. When the history of Westchester County was written in 1896, it would celebrate the Waring family’s prominent identification with the social life of Yonkers, their connection with St. John’s Episcopal Church, and their energy in conducting business affairs—all of which tethered them to the very founding of Yonkers’s history.