Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  In February 1954, when the Rockwells were still house hunting, Mary Rockwell wrote to her brother that she and Norman “are having a wonderful time together and besides that like Stockbridge so very much.” But at least one son, Jarvis—who, on finding that he had did not fit particularly well into the Air Force, hurried home as soon as he could—remembers how uncomfortable his parents looked together. “They really loved each other, I know that,” he says. “But it’s as if there was a kind of hollowness in my mother herself, and when they were together, I noticed my father especially seemed slightly uneasy, though he was trying to hide it. And I remember my father frequently at this time talking about that recurrent dream he had, that one about the empty lot, with rubbish all around, but a vast vacancy. He claimed it was New York City when he was young; I don’t know.”

  By March the Rockwells had found a perfect yellow clapboard house to buy, priced at the exact price they were asking for their Vermont house. Next to the cemetery, a few blocks from downtown, the house was ready for them to move into by early spring, and Mary Rockwell began to feel more settled. She wrote to her sister that she was already planning the enlargements she’d like to make, and she explained the particular virtues of the new residence, including the way the “monster,” as Norman called the television set, was tucked away into an anteroom. She shared a studio space with Jerry downtown, above the pharmacy and not far from Norman’s, and found it rewarding to have a place to hang her work. She and Norman attended a weekly art group currently held on Wednesday mornings at Peggy Best’s studio on Pine Street. Her husband continued to enjoy his studio overlooking Main Street, where he could look out of the huge plate-glass front and see “people instead of mountains.” Only a week later, however, she wrote to Nancy that “we” (quotation marks hers) had been struggling with a Post cover.

  From at least as early as their move out of the boardinghouse into their own home, the Rockwells felt sure that they had done the right thing by moving to Stockbridge. Here, unlike Arlington, the best of two worlds seemed at hand: small-town living in conjunction with a particularly vivid intellectual and artistic community. The social center of this scene was Peggy Best, an extremely talented artist whose close friendships with Wallace Stegner and John Cheever had introduced her to Marshall Best, one of the founders of Viking Press. A divorced mother of two, she had moved to Stockbridge to teach painting at Riggs in 1950. Peggy Best held salons and slide shows at her own little gallery on Pine Street, within walking distance of Riggs and all the Main Street shops; and she began holding a weekly sketch class that allowed the artists in town to pay for a communal chance to work from a life model and maintain their skills.

  Norman and Jarvis were not the only painters in the family now; Mary had begun to produce abstract canvases from art classes at Riggs. She and her husband joined Peggy’s classes, and all three became good friends. Setting aside the times at Peggy’s studio as opportunities to experiment, free of all professional demands, Rockwell practiced looser brushstrokes as he once again worked from live models, while Mary was able to try a new form of expression. Rockwell encouraged her to keep painting, including her bent toward the abstract, and his praise seems remarkably free of the condescension one might be tempted to excuse in such a situation. Mary began seeking Peggy out as a friend, someone to talk to when what her son Jonathan Best recalls as her “severe bouts of depression” settled in. “I remember my mother telling me [Mary] would walk for hours around Stockbridge at times trying to shake the depression and suicidal urges. I think my mother performed a lot of handholding,” he says.

  As usual, Rockwell himself was unavailable for much handholding. A few months after they had finished unpacking boxes and settling into the house on Church Street, he had to fly to Southern California for the Third National Jamboree of the Boy Scouts. He worried about leaving Mary before the family had had enough time to adjust to their new residence, but he also reminded himself that one of the motivations for their relocation was for times just like this: he could travel with the assurance of a nearby support community for his wife. Once he got out West, where he visited New Mexico as well, he became excited about the insights he was gaining for the increasingly burdensome calendars. On this trip, he noticed the unsung heroes of the organization, the leaders who gave up so much of their free time to direct the troops. His pleasure at this new observation allowed him to rekindle some enthusiasm for continuing the yearly calendar cover.

  Around this time, a nonprofit advertisement was published, using a photograph of Rockwell, pipe in hand, bow tie at neck, accompanied by the caption, “An All-week, All-year, All-life thing.” The ad, promoting church attendance, must have provided a good laugh in the family who now lived, after all, next to a cemetery, a daily memento mori. A short text, supposedly written by Rockwell, explained that his family went to church together on a regular, not special basis. Since the Rockwells had rarely attended church at all except for the baptism of the boys as three-month-olds at St. John’s–Wilmot in New Rochelle, the ad constitutes one of Rockwell’s few arguably hypocritical representations. Although someone else wrote the copy, he had to approve it. In one sense, however, in light of the work that the attendance crusade was performing on behalf of “all creeds, races and classes of people,” Rockwell’s pro bono work for them is consistent with his fervid belief in the principle of tolerance.

  He could not afford to do too many paintings or ads without reimbursement, however. During late spring 1954, as Rockwell worried about how he would pay for the new house, Tommy’s tuition at Bard, and Peter’s first year at Haverford, which would begin in the fall, he explored the possibility of Jerry attending City College in Manhattan, where tuition would be free after his eldest son established residency. Instead, Jerry decided to return to the Boston School of Fine Arts, and Rockwell had to figure in those costs as well. Throughout his life, he was sure to provide his sons with financial help, though he tried to balance cushioning their own load with encouraging their independence. When Peter and Tommy now decided to open a summer bookstore in nearby Lenox, for instance, Rockwell helped underwrite it, as well as paint the wooden sign for the door. The boys’ venture proved financially successful—they tripled their investment—and they were able to move the bookstore to Stockbridge the following summer.

  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 aggrie
ved 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 t
o 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.