American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

It was the summer of Dwight David Eisenhower’s presidential campaign and the Post wanted a portrait of him for its cover. Eisenhower was then far ahead of Adlai Stevenson in the polls, and a catchy jingle from an animated commercial—“Do you like Ike? I like Ike”—had become a national refrain. Commentators insisted that Americans craved change after twenty years of Democrats in the White House. One morning in mid-July, Rockwell received a phone call informing him that Eisenhower and Mamie were willing to sit for a portrait at 8:30 the next morning, presuming he could be in their suite by then, in the Brown Palace Hotel, in Denver, Colorado. So Rockwell hurriedly packed a bag, went to New York City, and caught a plane from La Guardia Field.18

  It was Rockwell’s first portrait of a presidential candidate, an admittedly limited art genre. But he warmed instantly to Eisenhower and found him visually engaging as well, despite the bald pate and prominent forehead that made his head seem larger than it was. “Eisenhower had about the most expressive face I ever painted,” Rockwell recalled. “Just like an actor’s—very mobile. When he talked, he used all the facial muscles. And he had a great, wide mouth that I liked.” Not immune to personal vanity, he asked Rockwell to airbrush one of his gold fillings. Rockwell’s solution was to paint the future president with his lips closed (but smiling).

  Rockwell received sad news on July 25, 1951. His onetime hero, J. C. Leyendecker, suffered a heart attack and died at his home, at the age of seventy-seven. Rockwell drove down to New Rochelle to pay his respects. “The coffin was in his studio,” he noted later, and the room had hardly changed since the long-ago days when he had been a regular visitor to the mansion on Mount Tom Road. Leyendecker’s smock was still hanging on the outside of the closet door; his brushes were laid out on the table. Hardly anyone turned out for the obsequies in the studio, just Charles Beach, Augusta Leyendecker, and a couple of cousins.

  Leyendecker’s last cover for The Saturday Evening Post had appeared in 1943, eight years before his death. “And that was the end of it all,” Rockwell observed.19 “It scared me. Joe had been the most famous illustrator in America. Then the Post had dropped him, the ad agencies had dropped him, the public had forgotten him. He died in obscurity.”

  Returning to his studio in Vermont, Rockwell glanced at the unfinished painting on his easel and thought, “it wasn’t a reassuring sight.” So few artists were able to survive over time and the number of illustrators was even smaller. It was chilling to contemplate how many of the brightest artistic reputations turned to dust.

  * * *

  It was in the shadow of Leyendecker’s death that Rockwell completed Saying Grace, which has been called his most popular painting. It is set on a drizzly afternoon, at a greasy-spoon diner at a train station, where an old lady in a daisy-bedecked straw hat and her small grandson count their blessings during the lunchtime rush. As they bow their heads and say grace, they attract the slightly stunned gaze of a handful of diners, a typical Rockwellian clan made up of well-intentioned strangers, men of different ages and backgrounds who look up from their conversations and their newspapers. The painting is a ballet of gazes, a delicate interplay of actions and reactions that together affirm the power, the jolt of connection, afforded by the act of looking.

  The little boy is portrayed from the back, his white shirt glowing against the somber, tobacco-brown tones of the painting. He has taken off his blazer, which is bunched up behind him on the red cushion of his bentwood chair. Rockwell lavishes great tenderness on the back of the boy’s neck, the luminous, baby-soft skin extending from his white shirt collar up to the razored line of his reddish-gold hair and occupying the focal center of the composition. The boy seems to be breathing a purer kind of air than the figures around him. He harks back to earlier Rockwell paintings that offer a vision of youthful male beauty lying beyond reach. The cigar-smoking man in the lower left is a spatial marker, occupying the foreground and keeping the boy safely in the middle distance. Although only a sliver of the man is visible, the objects on his table—used silverware, a folded copy of The New York Times, a sludgy cup of coffee—suggest he has been sitting there for a while. He’s a watchman, keeping Rockwell at a distance from the warm, beating heart of the painting.

  The cover ran on November 24, 1951—the date matters, because it was timed to coincide with Thanksgiving. The grandmother and grandson are dressed up for the holiday. Are they at the end of a train journey, or the beginning? Presumably the latter. The grandma has her knitting bag to keep her occupied for the ride. The boy’s railroad ticket is tucked into the ribbon of his hat, which he has taken off and hung on the handle of an umbrella. Outside the plate-glass window, a dense fog settles over the buildings in the railroad yard. A smattering of backward, Cubist-style lettering on the window—“TNARU”—spells the end of the word restaurant while containing the anagram UN-ART and suggesting the self-mocking message U R an ANT.

  When the Post did a survey asking readers to name their favorite Rockwell cover, Saying Grace won hands-down. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

  To obtain authentic-looking details, Rockwell consulted a variety of sources. He made several trips to the train station in Troy. He arranged for an actual Automat in New York City to deliver an assortment of chairs, tables, and dishes to his studio. (“A truck pulled up, deposited the furniture, then took it away a few days later,” recalled his cook, Marie Briggs.) The painting did not come easily. He did only three Post covers that year and Saying Grace ate up months. The illustrator George Hughes remembered a night when Rockwell threw the canvas into the snow in a fit of disgust, only to retrieve it the next morning.

  The seven figures who appear in the painting posed in his studio, in separate shifts. They included his photographer (Gene Pelham), his son Jarvis, and eight-year-old Don Hubert, Jr., whom Rockwell plucked out of a third-grade classroom at the Arlington Memorial School. The little boy turned out to be a fidgety model, unable to hold still even for a photograph. “He Scotch-taped my feet to the floor of his studio,” Hubert recalled later, without bitterness. And poor May Walker, the widow who posed as the grandmother, her hands clasped in prayer. She did not live to see the cover, dying just a few days before it appeared on newsstands.20

  In 1955, when the Post did a survey asking readers to name their favorite Rockwell cover, Saying Grace won hands down. Perhaps it appealed to America’s sense of itself as a nation of believers, in stark contrast to the Soviet Union and its ranks of godless Communists. As President Eisenhower once remarked, “Our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”21

  * * *

  The fall of 1952 saw the election of General Eisenhower to the White House, but in Arlington, Vermont, it was a season of loss and mourning. On September 15, Rockwell’s dear friend John Atherton died in a drowning accident in New Brunswick, Canada, where he and his wife, Maxine, had gone on a salmon-fishing expedition. He was only fifty-two.

  Just the year before, Atherton had published The Fly and the Fish, which was dedicated to his wife, and would become a classic of angling literature. It was a love letter to the Batten Kill, on whose banks Atherton lived. There he built himself a house, “the most modern house in Arlington,” as Maxine described it, a low, horizontal structure that seemed to blend with the hillside.22 Maxine buried his ashes behind the house, beneath a maple on the riverbank. For a few weeks that fall, not wanting to be alone, she stayed with Rockwell and Mary. She found him diverting and appreciated his sense of humor. “Norman was very amusing,” she recalled. “He would call me in and ask for comments and I loved it. Once he took my advice by destroying a painting.”23

  His marriage was a protracted struggle, however, and people in Arlington felt sorry for him. That fall, Mary had another car accident. It was Halloween; she was driving home from an appointment at Riggs at 5:30 in the evening when she rounded a curve and hit a stalled car. The front end of her brand-new Chevy station wagon was “badly smashed,” accord
ing to the accident report, and she suffered various cuts and bruises. After that, Rockwell arranged for her to take a car service to her appointments at Austen Riggs.

  On November 10 Rockwell joined the rest of Arlington in mourning the death of an eleven-year-old boy in a hunting accident near his house. Jon Stroffoleno was in the woods, raccoon hunting, when a shotgun carried by his twelve-year-old sister, Jo, discharged.24 He was the nephew of Rockwell’s next-door neighbor, Buddy Edgerton, who later recalled that Rockwell attended the funeral and paid a sympathy visit to the boy’s parents carrying a parcel neatly wrapped in brown paper. It was a charcoal portrait of their son. “I’m sorry it’s not so good,” Rockwell stammered. “I did it from memory.”

  * * *

  He received a bit of good news that month when a painting of his was “purchased” by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was his first painting acquired by a museum; the negotiations had been more intricate than anyone could have imagined. He had first been contacted two years earlier by Frederic Price of the Ferargil Galleries, who was a friend of Robert Beverly Hale, a curator who had been hired by the Met to organize a department of contemporary American art. Although Hale was himself an abstract painter, he was sufficiently ecumenical as a curator to be sympathetic when Price, trying to drum up business, suggested that he buy a Rockwell for the collection.

  In a letter intended to introduce himself to Rockwell, Hale offered effusive praise. “I feel that you are the most thoroughly American of all of our painters today,” he noted, then took a witty if unconvincing jab at artists who favored abstraction. “At this time, I feel, the so-called international style has overcome all the boys for better or worse and unless something is done about it nobody will ever know what our country looked like when we are dead.”25

  Rockwell offered the museum an oil-on-board study for Freedom of Speech, which, like the finished painting, portrays a Lincolnesque man standing up to speak at a packed town meeting. The rough sketch, as Rockwell called it, is twenty-one by seventeen inches, smaller than the finished version and more casually composed; the central figure is devoid of the looming quality that distinguishes the later work. But the sketch is lovely nonetheless, with a visceral feeling and relatively loose brushwork. Rockwell let it go for the severely reduced price of one hundred dollars.

  The Post ran a photograph of him gaily waving a jumbo-sized palette beneath the headline, ROCKWELL MADE IT.26 The item noted that Rockwell uttered “a gladsome yelp” when he learned that the Met had bought his painting, for an undisclosed price.

  * * *

  By now Rockwell’s contact with the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge had broadened considerably. Bills came in not only for Mary’s care but for that of eighteen-year-old Tom as well. As a freshman at Princeton, overwhelmed by academic pressure, Tom had developed an ulcer and dropped out midterm. “My mother wanted me to see her psychiatrist,” he recalled. So Tom went to see Dr. Knight, who recommended that he be admitted to Austen Riggs as an inpatient and be treated for an anxiety disorder. Tom entered Riggs on March 24, 1952, and would stay for four months. The upshot was that he left Princeton and transferred to the less orthodox Bard College.

  In January 1953, alarmed to realize that Mary was drinking heavily again, Rockwell sent a letter special delivery to Dr. Knight at Austen Riggs. It was decided that Mary would return to Stockbridge and be admitted to Riggs as an inpatient for a few weeks, in order to dry out. Dr. Knight assured Rockwell, on the 29th: “I am trying to help her come to a redefinition of social drinking on a much reduced basis, and to accept the idea that there is to be no drinking at all except under legitimate social drinking conditions.”27

  Today, it might seem peculiar that a doctor would advise an alcoholic patient to continue her custom of pre-dinner cocktails instead of trying to get her off alcohol altogether. But such measures were standard in the bibulous fifties. Dr. Knight believed Mary was making “good progress,” and he seemed less concerned about her drinking than her dependence on sleeping pills. “At the present time she is taking more sedation than we would like to see continue very long,” he apprised Rockwell. “However, she apparently needs it. She is taking up to six grains of Seconal to get to sleep at night. She is also taking two dexamyl tablets a day.”28

  Rockwell’s mother, too, was ailing and making demands that struck him as impossible. At the time she was living in Providence, Rhode Island, with her nephew John Orpen, a retired ice dealer who owned a rambling old house on University Avenue. Rockwell sent him a weekly check of sixty dollars to cover his mother’s room and board. On February 17, after suffering a stroke that left her bedridden, she was moved into a nursing home in West Warwick, Rhode Island, where she died three weeks later, the day before her eighty-seventh birthday.29

  Rockwell left no comment about his mother’s death, and their relationship, which had been strained, at best, was misrepresented in the wire-service obituary that was published in newspapers across the country. “Mrs. Rockwell had made her home with her son in Arlington, Vt., until 15 months ago, when she went to live with a nephew in Rhode Island.” This was untrue. Whether the reporter made an innocent mistake or Rockwell provided incorrect information, Mrs. Rockwell never lived with her artist-son.

  When Mrs. Rockwell died, her obituary left readers with a touching image, a vision of her milling about her son’s farmhouse, as integral to family life as the elderly figures who populate his paintings. In reality, he relegated responsibility for his mother’s care to his wife and the array of relatives and strangers with whom she boarded over the years. In a telling omission, he never painted a portrait of his mother, and her only appearance in his work is as a table guest in Freedom from Want.

  * * *

  In the weeks following his mother’s death, Rockwell completed a memorable Post cover, The Shiner,30 which stands with Rosie the Riveter as an enchanting representation of female strength. It shows a girl with red braids and a black eye sitting in a school corridor, outside the principal’s office. You assume she is about to be reprimanded and possibly suspended for an infraction, perhaps a fight with a boy. Nonetheless, she smiles defiantly and occupies the center of the painting with the pluck and sturdiness of a true heroine. In the distance, behind an open door, a bespectacled principal and his pencil-thin secretary appear somber and even grave as they discuss the girl’s transgression.

  The model for the painting was ten-year-old Mary Whalen of Arlington, Vermont, the daughter of Rockwell’s lawyer. In trying to furnish her with a black eye, Rockwell faced an unprecedented challenge. Initially he tried brushing charcoal over Mary’s left eye, but a bruise is composed of many colors, and his charcoal bruise didn’t look convincing. He checked the hospital in Bennington for eye-injured patients, but there were none, so he broadened his orbital search. He went to Pittsfield General Hospital, which led to an article in The Berkshire Eagle. He told a reporter that he would accept a black eye in any of its “ripe” stages of discoloration—brown, taupe, red, saffron, or yellow-green, “just so it’s vivid and realistic.”31 Several hundred people responded, many of them prisoners. Finally, the father of two-and-a-half-year-old Tommy Forsberg, of Worcester, Massachusetts, who had fallen down a flight of stairs that left him with two shiners, drove the boy to Rockwell’s studio and had him pose.32 The desired results were achieved when Rockwell painted a bruise onto Mary Whalen’s trusting young face.

  * * *

  In the course of discussing the psychological problems of his wife and their son Tom with Dr. Knight, Rockwell became increasingly interested in entering therapy himself. Dr. Knight, who had overseen Tom’s four-month hospitalization at Riggs the previous year, thought it would be inappropriate for him to treat so many members of the same family. He referred Rockwell to an analyst on his staff: Erik Erikson, a German émigré who had been an artist in his wandering youth and was one of the best-known psychoanalysts in the country.

  The Shiner, 1954, stands with Rosie the Riveter as a protofeminist represent
ation of female strength. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

  In an internal memo written on July 15, 1953, Dr. Knight noted that Rockwell “is very happy at the prospect of working with a therapist who is also an artist. He is reluctant to give up time to appointments from his work, and prefers a late afternoon appointment so that the day will not be mixed up too badly.”33 It was arranged that Rockwell, who was on a quick assignment in Northern California, helping to promote the Boy Scouts’ third National Jamboree, would phone Riggs and make an appointment with Erikson’s secretary when he returned.

  His bookkeeper remembers an afternoon when Rockwell casually mentioned that he was thinking of relocating to Stockbridge for the winter. Schafer, who was about to leave for Cape Cod for the weekend, said, “Let’s talk about it when I get back.” By the time he returned on Monday, Rockwell and his wife had left Vermont and were living in the Homestead Inn, a boardinghouse in Stockbridge.

  It was reported in the Vermont papers, a bit too optimistically, that Rockwell planned to return home in the spring. (“This is not the first time that this topnotch artist has been away from his Arlington studio for several months.”34) But in fact he would never return to the house on the village green, except to sell it a year later.

  He had lived in Arlington, Vermont, for fourteen years and, in many ways, the town and its residents had served him well. In the eyes of millions of Americans, his scenes of everyday life in this typical-enough New England village said something important about our collective character as a nation. It was here that he had painted his epic Four Freedoms and become America’s painter in chief. Moreover, it was here that he had painted Shuffleton’s Barbershop in 1950 and Saying Grace in 1952, masterpieces of illustration that Americanized Dutch realism.

  After he moved away from Arlington, Rockwell put its residents out of his mind almost instantly. “If someone had been a very close friend,” Chris Schafer recalled, “when Norman moved, or when they moved, it was as if they had never existed. Everyone complained that he never kept in touch. People said, We were his best friend, and now we don’t hear from him.”35