Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  Mee, Charles L., Jr. Rembrandt’s Portrait. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

  Meyer, Susan E. America’s Great Illustrators. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978.

  ———. Norman Rockwell’s People. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981.

  ———. Norman Rockwell’s World War II: Impressions from the Homefront. San Antonio: USAA Foundation, 1991.

  Michaelis, David. N. C. Wyeth: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1998.

  Miller, Alice. The Drama of the Gifted Child. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

  Millhauser, Steven. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. New York: Vintage, 1997.

  Milroy, Elizabeth. Painters of a New Century: The Eight and American Art. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1991.

  Mitnick, Barbara. “The History of History Painting,” in William Ayers, ed., Picturing History: American Painting, 1770–1930. New York: Rizzoli, 1993.

  ———, and William H. Gerdts. “Natural Aristocrats in a Democracy: 1810–1870,” in American Portraiture in the Grand Manner: 1720–1920. Ed. Michael Quick, et al. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1981.

  Moffatt, Laurie Norton. Norman Rockwell, A Definitive Catalogue, 2 vols. Stockbridge, Mass.: Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge and the University of New England Presses, 1986.

  Morris, Wright. “Norman Rockwell’s America,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1957.

  Murray, Stuart. Norman Rockwell at Home in Vermont: The Arlington Years, 1939–1953. Bennington, Vt.: Images from the Past, Inc., 1997.

  ———, and James McCabe. Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms: Images that Inspire a Nation. Stockbridge, Mass.: Berkshire House, 1993.

  Musser, Charles. “Work, Ideology and Chaplin’s Tramp,” Radical History Review 41 (Spring 1988).

  Myers, Kenneth John. The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 1820–1895. Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum of Westchester, 1987.

  Nemerov, Alexander. “Wyeth’s Theatre of Illustration,” American Art 6, no. 2 (Spring 1992).

  Norman Rockwell: A Centennial Celebration: The Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge. New York: BDD Illustrated Books, 1993.

  “Norman Rockwell: Illustrator of America’s Heritage,” American History Illustrated, no. 21 (December 1986).

  Ohmann, Richard. “Where Did Mass Culture Come From?” Berkshire Review, 1981.

  Olson, Lester C. “Portraits in Praise of a People: A Rhetoric Analysis of Norman Rockwell’s Icons in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ Campaign,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (February 1983).

  Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1989.

  Park, Marlene. “Lynching and Anti-lynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s,” Prospects 18 (1993).

  Pells, Richard H. Radical Visions and American Dreams. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

  Perkins, David. English Romantic Writers. New York: Harcourt Trade Publishers, 1967.

  Peters, Margot. The House of Barrymore. New York: Knopf, 1990.

  Pitz, Henry C. The Brandywine Tradition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969.

  Pope, Alfred, M.D. “Research at McLean Hospital: 1944–1989,” McLean Hospital Journal 15 (Belmont, Mass.: McLean Hospital, 1990), 27–52.

  Radway, Janice. “The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Reader,” in Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America: Literature and Social History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

  Ratcliff, Carter. “Barnett Newman: Citizen of the Infinitely Large Small Republic,” Art In America (September 1991).

  Reed, Walt, and Roger Reed. The Illustrator in America, 1880–1980: A Century of Illustration. New York: Madison Square Press, 1984.

  Reynolds, Joshua. Discourses on Art. Ed. Robert R. Wark. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.

  Riding, Alan. “Mysteries in the Mirror of a Dutch Master’s Soul,” New York Times, July 21, 1999.

  Ringenbach, Paul T. Tramps and Reformers, 1873–1916: The Discovery of Unemployment in New York. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973.

  Robinson, David. Chaplin: His Life and Art. London: Collins, 1985.

  Rockwell, Margaret. Norman Rockwell’s Chronicles of America. New York: Michael Friedman Publishing, 1996.

  Rockwell, Norman. Rockwell on Rockwell: How I Make a Picture. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1979.

  Rockwell, Norman, as told to Tom Rockwell. Norman Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994.

  Rockwell, Thomas. The Best of Norman Rockwell. Philadelphia: Courage Books, 1988.

  Rosen, Charles, and Henri Zerner. “Scenes from the American Dream,” The New York Review of Books, August 10, 2000.

  Rosenblum, Robert. On Modern American Art: Selected Essays. New York: Abrams, 1999.

  Rubin, Joan Shelly. “Between Culture and Consumption: The Mediations of the Middlebrow,” in Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

  Russell, John. Matisse: Father and Son. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

  Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.

  Samuel F. B. Morse: Educator and Champion of the Arts. Exhibition catalog. New York: National Academy of Design, 1982.

  Schama, Simon. An Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Knopf, 1987.

  Scharf, J. Thomas. History of Westchester County, New York, including Morrisania, New York City. In two volumes, illustrated. Philadelphia: L. E. Preston and Co., 1986.

  Schau, Michael. J. C. Leyendecker. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1974.

  Schjeldahl, Peter. “Fanfares for the Common Man,” The New Yorker, Nov. 22, 1999.

  Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen, 1987.

  Segal, Eric. “Norman Rockwell and the Fashioning of American Masculinity,” The Art Bulletin 78 (December 1996).

  Sklar, Martin J. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

  Sonder, Ben. The Legacy of Norman Rockwell. New York: Todtri Productions Limited, 1997.

  Stack, Neil. Some Phases of Dandyism. New York: Girard Press, 1924.

  Stegner, Wallace. “The Power of Homely Detail,” American Heritage 36 (August/September 1985).

  Steiner, Raymond J. The Art Students League of New York: A History. Saugerties, N.Y.: CSS Publications, 1999.

  Stern, Robert A. M., Gregory Gilmartin, and John Massengale. New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890–1915. New York: Rizzoli, 1995.

  Story, Margaret. Individuality and Clothes. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1930.

  Susman, Warren, ed. Culture and Commitment, 1929–1954. New York: George Braziller, 1973.

  Sutton, S. B. Crossroads in Psychiatry: A History of the McLean Hospital. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1986.

  Tebbel, John. George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post. New York: Doubleday, 1948.

  ———, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, eds. The Magazine in America, 1741–1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

  Thorpe, Thomas Bangs. “New York Artists Life Fifty Years Ago,” Appleton’s Journal 7, May 25, 1872.

  Truettner, William H., and Roger B. Stern, eds. Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1999.

  Updike, John. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1983.

  ———. More Matter: Essays and Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1999.

  Wakefield, Dan. New York in the Fifties. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

  Wallerstein, Immanuel. “Eurocentrism and Its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science,” New Left Review 226 (1997).

  Walton, Donald. A Rockwell Portrait. Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1978.

&nbs
p; Washington, Ida H. Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography. Shelburne, Vt.: New England Press, 1982.

  Weithas, Art, ed. Illustrators XXX. New York: Madison Square Press, 1989.

  Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York and the Rise of the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

  Wood, Paul, et al. Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties. New Haven: Yale University Press in conjunction with the Open University, 1993.

  Wright, Elizabeth. Speaking Desires Can Be Dangerous: The Poetics of the Unconscious. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

  Yalom, Marilyn. A History of the Breast. New York: Knopf, 1977.

  Yarnall, James L., and William H. Gerdts, eds. Catalogues, from the Beginning Through the 1876 Centennial Year. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.

  Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

  Notes

  Introduction and Acknowledgments

  with art critics scrambling In the past two years, articles reflecting the current range of opinion about Rockwell’s artistic worth include Edgar Allen Beem, “A Rockwell Renaissance?,” ARTnews 98, New York, Sept. 1999, 134–37; Michael Kimmelman, “Renaissance for a ‘Lightweight,’ ” New York Times, Nov. 7, 1999, 1; David Maraniss, “American Beauty,” Washington Post Magazine, May 21, 2000, 6; Peter Schjeldahl, “Fanfares for the Common Man,” New Yorker, Nov. 22, 1999, 190–94; and Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, “Scenes from the American Dream,” New York Review of Books, Aug. 10, 2000, 16–20.

  The middle ground Deborah Solomon, “In Praise of Bad Art,” New York Times, Jan. 22, 1999, 34.

  money, they scoffed Norman Rockwell (hereafter NR), as told to Tom Rockwell (hereafter TR), Norman Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator (hereafter MAI), 59.

  PART I: NEW YORK

  1: Narrative Connections, the Heart of an Illustrator

  “living out the cover” Jarvis Rockwell (hereafter JR) interview, Aug. 19, 1999.

  “I never caught on” Ibid.

  “Finally, my father changed” Ibid.

  “It was very unpleasant” Ibid.

  That crucial next stage This following description on developing a narrative line is based on Rockwell on Rockwell, 28–29.

  “I think the painting” Peter Rockwell (hereafter PR) interview, June 20, 2000.

  2: Family Ties That Bind

  Given the option The following account of Norman Rockwell’s genealogy is based on personal family archives, professional genealogists’ research, church records, city directories, and old letters from family members.

  But what Rockwell MAI, 20.

  Howard’s periodic tirades Ibid.

  In between his forays The Alexander Smith carpet works was probably the largest carpet industry in the world, at least until the 1950s, when the plant moved from Yonkers to Mississippi. Providing carpets and rugs to wealthy collectors around the world—perhaps most famously, for the czars—as well as covering the floors of middle-class Americans, the industry experimented in the mid-twentieth century with hiring prominent artists such as Chagall and Matisse to create special designs for them.

  “He was genial” “Necrology,” “Opera Glass,” Westchester County Fair, Aug. 17, 1886.

  “Mr. Hill had resided” Yonkers Statesman, Aug. 17, 1886.

  “enough people”: Mary Amy Orpen (hereafter MAO) interview, Sept. 27, 2000.

  “potboilers” TR interview, Sept. 15, 1999.

  “an artistic painter” Yonkers Statesman, Mar. 7, 1888.

  “Yes, she acted” MAO interview, Sept. 27, 2000.

  “It’s almost as if” Dale Heister letter to TR, July 1986.

  “A people of” and “exceptionally literate” David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, 87.

  “whose Christian fidelity” J. Thomas Scharf, History of Westchester County, 113.

  “fine country seat” and “to be considered” Rev. Charles Elmer Allison, The History of Yonkers (Harrison, N.Y., 1896, 1984), 383.

  “Apparently she was considered” MAO interview, Sept. 27, 2000.

  “She spoke” and “I didn’t” Ibid.

  The beauty of the ceremony Gleaner, July 22, 1891.

  “agreeable fascination” and “the bride” Ibid.

  3: City Boy, Born and Bred

  “My mother” MAI, 21.

  “darn near died” and “Mercy Percy” Ibid., 22.

  “I had” and “in terror,” Ibid., 23.

  The crusty See, for instance, Eric Segal, “Norman Rockwell and the Fashioning of American Masculinity,” 637–38.

  “Norman and I” This account was repeated to me by several people who knew Nancy Hill or NR.

  “I know” and “she saw” MAO interview, Sept. 27, 2000.

  “lower middle-class” and “the tough slum” MAI, 22.

  “Little Norman” Letter from Nancy to Jerry Rockwell, quoted from memory by Dick Rockwell (hereafter DR) to author, interview, July 11, 2000.

  “I considered myself” and “I always felt” Jerry Rockwell, unpublished memoir.

  “My father” DR letter to author, July 11, 2000.

  “I have” Jerry Rockwell, unpublished memoir.

  By the time John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America: 1741–1990, 75.

  Erik Erikson Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 314.

  “language” Stephan F. Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School, 113.

  “They left out” Ibid., 127.

  “It was sort of” MAI, 37.

  “I do recall” and “The Spanish-American War” Jerry Rockwell, unpublished memoir.

  “My ability” MAI, 37.

  “Whenever I think” Ibid., 27.

  “I was never” Ibid.

  dug holes “Norman Rockwell by Norman Rockwell,” Esquire, Jan. 1962, 69.

  “There was” MAI, 22.

  “I was born” “Norman Rockwell by Norman Rockwell,” Esquire, Jan. 1962, 69.

  In the far Upper West Side MAI, 22–23.

  “very dictatorial” Ibid., 20.

  “I do remember” Jerry Rockwell, unpublished memoir.

  “He was intensely loyal” MAI, 27.

  private wedding “Love Costs Millions in a Woman’s Case,” New York Times, Nov. 27, 1901.

  “The marriage” and “He says” and “If Mr. Palmer” Ibid.

  “followed a request” Frank A. Crampton, Deep Enough, n.p.

  4: A Dickensian Sensibility

  “meaning of life” Benjamin Stolberg, quoted in Jan Cohn, Creating America, 117.

  “even, colorless voice” MAI, 28.

  “curing” Peter Rockwell first discussed this recollection of his father’s in a talk he gave at the Berkshire County Museum, Nov. 12, 1999.

  “art, or at least art that matters” “Comforting, Funny Outlandishness That Sticks to Its Own Logic,” New York Times, Dec. 1, 2000, E33.

  “I would . . . draw” and “So that” MAI, 28.

  “to his own father” Harold Bloom, Charles Dickens, 6.

  “had something aristocratic” and “My father’s life” MAI, 27.

  “I’d draw Mr. Micawber’s” Ibid., 9.

  Dickens’s An astonishing amount of first-rate scholarship now exists on Charles Dickens, but one of the easiest, most informative places to start is Paul Davis, Charles Dickens: A to Z (New York, 1998).

  “I sometimes think” and “Maybe as I grew” MAI, 35. Rockwell repeated this information for decades, with slight variations, whenever he was asked to explain his art.

  “mock fireplace” MAI, 22.

  “The central hall” Jerry Rockwell, unpublished memoir.

  “Aunt Nancy” MAO interview, Sept. 27, 2000.

  “I guessed” MAI, 28.

  “we didn’t visit” Ibid., 17.

  The vivid recollection In the 1980s, the subject of Rockwell’s anecdote would be (mis)identified as Anne Waring Paddock, whose husband, Walter Halse
y Paddock, in fact didn’t die until 1902, basically of old age, and whose son William died at age twenty, hardly a little boy.