Norman Rockwell (42 page)

Word had gotten out not only to art students that Arlington was a great place to look at illustration up close. Through his friendship with Jack Atherton, George Hughes, a stylish illustrator a generation younger than Rockwell, had decided to join the choice community of artists. He and his wife, Casey, loved to ski, and they were ready to exchange the more social circles they’d inhabited the last few years for the rural atmosphere Jack had found transformative for his own work. Known primarily for fashion drawings and illustrations of romantic stories, Hughes wanted to develop as a consistent
Post
artist; the magazine had already solicited his work. Underestimating the challenges of running a farm, the couple bought their own and promptly threw a party to meet the town’s artists. Norman convinced them to make it a costume party, and he came in an elaborate eighteenth-century military uniform—“He loved costume parties,” remembered Hughes, decades later. On another occasion, Rockwell asked Hughes to accompany him to a party with a theme of the World War I armistice. The men rented French-Algerian soldier costumes from a theatrical costume supplier in Manhattan that Rockwell had used often, and Hughes remembers that they had a riotously good time.

By this time, the Rockwells had become more than casual, if less than close, friends with John and Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Mary joined in the library board’s reading of new books, in the process screening literature for the Book-of-the-Month Club, which Dorothy advised, and helped appropriate the tiny library’s funds for future purchases. Dorothy had found herself reaching out to the community during the past year even more than usual, as solace for her son’s death in the Philippines the previous summer. From her own children’s comments, it appears that Mary Rockwell almost idolized the powerful woman, as did many others. Her academic background—a Ph.D. in French literature from Columbia University—and her publications record—she had published everything from a book on Montessori teaching methods to novels to children’s literature, these last in the genre of parent-child question-and-answer stories that Rockwell had illustrated when he was starting his career—combined to make her a daunting figure. But her devotion to communal welfare meant that she involved herself deeply with the Arlington community, and she especially enjoyed encouraging people like Mary, who was trying to combine dedicated mothering with developing her own nascent literary talents.

The Fishers also quietly worked to support liberal causes, and, during this summer, they and the Rockwells signed a letter to the president of the University of Vermont commending the sorority that had recently bucked the system in order to accept a “young colored woman.” The letter asked that President Millis pass on to the students the four signatees’ “great pleasure in learning from their action, that there is still vitality in Vermont’s old, humane tradition of fair play to all, and that each individual shall be valued—or not—only on his personal worth.” In the response she sent to the group, the dean of women contrasted the Fishers’ and Rockwells’ generous, unsolicited shows of support to the criticism of the Alpha Xi Delta girls that she continued to receive daily.

Rockwell corresponded during this same period with the Bronx Interracial Conference regarding race relations. And, except for the occasional porter, blacks continued to be conspicuous for their absence on his
Post
covers. George Horace Lorimer had left the
Post
in 1937, and certainly by the time of Ben Hibbs’s ascension to editor in chief, in 1942, Rockwell could have dared to push the issue. Still, unless he was asked to compromise his painting or to paint a scene that flouted his deeply held beliefs, he was unlikely to protest such cultural omissions; his validation at the hands of the
Post
’s staff, and his glorification through its public, were more important. He would express his social liberality elsewhere.

In spite of the liberal politics that Rockwell shared with Dorothy Canfield Fisher, he could never shake his ambivalence toward her. Certainly he was less categorical in his thinking or response than she was—and less vocal, as well. Although he voted for the Socialist candidate for president in 1948, Norman Thomas, he allowed fellow Vermonters to assume he supported the Republican candidate instead. Thomas appealed to many of Rockwell’s core beliefs, even if at first glance, the pacifist would not seem a natural choice for the man who illustrated the Four Freedoms. But both men held to positions that would later become mainstream liberal tenets: for a minimum wage, against child labor; against communism as embodied in Stalinist Russia, but for a communal, compassionate government involved in its citizens’ lives. During Rockwell’s early career, Thomas had been a Presbyterian preacher, ministering to the poor in Harlem. After he left the pastorate to become a politician, he carved out a kind of patriotism extremely congenial to Rockwell. One of his professions of faith that would have resonated easily with the illustrator held that “If you want a symbolic gesture, don’t burn the flag; wash it.”

But Rockwell kept his own close counsel about things political, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher thought that a mistake. The artist thought that the best way for him to reach the largest audience—with stories he believed in painting—was to let people hope he voted their way, as long as that way was consonant with democracy. Fisher was more vocal, and to Rockwell, at least according to Mary’s comments about his dislike, she was cleverly self-congratulatory in her promotion of such writers as Richard Wright and Isak Dinesen. Mary insisted that her husband was simply irritated that Fisher sparkled at social gatherings and took the attention off him. Probably there was envy involved, but even the celebratory preface Fisher had written in the spring for a fall publication about Rockwell, Arthur Guptill’s
Norman Rockwell: Illustrator,
sounded some notes that would have seemed patronizing to the shrewd artist. In defending Rockwell’s neglect of the negative side of life, she claims that his omission of tragedy can’t be aimed only at pleasing the public or he’d paint nature, which has a huge audience, and he fails to take that path. “He purposefully makes his own choice from an inner necessity. Every artist learns early, or he is no artist, that he must drink out of his own cup, must cultivate his own half-acre, because he never can have any other.”

Dorothy Canfield Fisher did make the important point that until now had been mentioned only casually: Rockwell’s debt to seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters. Although the illustrator admired Vermeer’s mastery greatly (on a trip to Delft he even proudly figured out the exact window Vermeer looked out to capture a certain quality of light), it was the painters considered more strictly within the genre tradition that Rockwell emulated, including Ter Borch, Jan Steen, and, especially, Pieter de Hooch. Years later, Peter Rockwell, himself an art historian, would second this selection, insisting that de Hooch, not Vermeer, most strongly informed his father’s treatment of light; and even local publications such as
Vermont Life
within a year of Guptill’s book declared that Rockwell should be ranked with “great genre painters,” though the writer suggested that we link him with American artists such as George Caleb Bingham. Still, as the Manhattan dealer Michel Witmer insists, “the brilliant way that Vermeer pulled off a fluffy beauty in the face of the everydayness of things is surely ancestor to Rockwell, just as Velázquez’s clever rendering of even great people as humble and real explains Rockwell’s admiration of the Spanish painter.”

Not least for the serious emphasis it gave to the painterly qualities in Rockwell, Arthur Guptill’s book marked an important moment in Rockwell’s career. The text provided a brief glance at Rockwell’s charming rural life in Vermont, assessed the full force of his charm and wit, then devoted most of its pages to explaining how Rockwell painted his pictures. The explanations were technical and fulfilling, taking the reader through the photography sessions to the preliminary sketches to the painting itself. Even the brands of products are listed, from the eraser Rockwell used to degloss his sketching paper, to the fixative he used to keep his charcoal from smudging, to the brand of paints and undercoating. Guptill draws a picture of the way Rockwell sets up his palette, naming every color, from the alizaron crimson to cadmium orange to cobalt blue.

The book struck a respectful and affectionate tone, and it remains a classic for anyone wanting to understand Rockwell’s technique. That Guptill undertook the project, for which he accompanied Rockwell around the country on various photography shoots, as well as sitting with him in the studio, speaks to the artist’s national prominence in 1946.

Rockwell took a few days during the fall to promote the book, which generally received positive reviews, though just as frequent were remarks that its subject was outré among current painters. One tack commonly used among interviewers was that of
The Cleveland News,
where Rockwell’s superficial country airs were contrasted in surprise with his sophisticated conversation. Writing of the “people’s illustrator,” the editor exclaims “what a country boy Rockwell, the New York City born-and-educated man, looks! . . . lean, emaciated, homely, relaxed, with a humorous drawl and gentle good manners.” At a lunch in honor of Rockwell that the editor attended, before the amazed newspaperman knows it, the artist is discoursing with art directors about “Rivera and Orozco” or “telling art school students about the house-paint preparations which will save their canvases.”

The artist did not devote as much time to promoting Guptill’s book as the author had hoped for, since Rockwell could not afford the time off work. The family traveled to California for the holidays, where the local film industry lavished press attention on Rockwell for the extensive advertising he had created for Twentieth Century–Fox’s
The Razor’s Edge,
especially a full-color painting of actor Tyrone Power. Yielding more pleasure to both Mary and Norman, however, was their year-end realization that the earnings had reached $52,600 in 1946, news that relieved their worry over escalating costs such as Jarvis’s private school bills and Nancy Rockwell’s mostly imaginary health problems.

Mary was irritated over nonfamily members as well who, she felt, tried to claim too many of her husband’s resources. Most of all, she was growing jealous of Gene Pelham, whose indispensability Rockwell often and loudly proclaimed. Rockwell’s sincere and obvious appreciation of the photographer’s devotion to the artist’s needs, taking as many pictures as his boss needed, and staying as late as necessary to develop them, encouraged Pelham’s loyalty. Rockwell’s instinctive ability to make others protective of him engendered a sense of intimacy on the part of the caretaker that wasn’t necessarily felt by Rockwell himself. As an elderly man, Gene Pelham made some slightly contemptuous references to Mary’s flightiness that suggested he and Mary were competing to feel most important to the illustrator.

Two new acquaintances whom both Norman and Mary believed to represent real improvements to their social and professional lives were Mary and Chris Schafer, who moved from Chicago to Arlington this year because they wanted a rural place to raise their kids. They bought illustrator George Hughes’s farm, but they likewise decided that tending fifty cows was more work than they had bargained for, and they sold it but stayed in Arlington anyway. The bastion of illustrators nestled within the mountain community gave rise to a lively social life. “Any event was an excuse for a party,” Mary Schafer remembers. “Bastille day, a birthday, whatever. Conversation [was] amazing, its range—Rockwell familiar with subjects from baseball to literature, Jack so much about music. Norman [possessed such a] keen sense of humor.” The overabundance of wit led to many long nights of party games, including Charades, Twenty Questions, and something called “the Game,” where players wrote on a sheet of paper what they most liked and disliked. The papers were distributed and people guessed who had written what. Rockwell’s were always particularly telling, she recalls: what did he most like? Checks in the mail. And he liked least the extra edges of perforated white paper surrounding a sheet of new postage stamps.

It’s pleasant to think, at least, that the new vitality the family-oriented Schafers brought to the community inspired the Rockwells to seek more time to enjoy their own brood. In 1947, Norman and Mary decided that they deserved a real vacation again, one with no other relatives around. They hadn’t really taken one, except to go to California, since Peter’s birth. And, as the theme of children appeared in all six of his
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covers this year, Rockwell seemed to be especially aware of his sons, possibly, as Jarvis suggests, because the oldest one had been at boarding school. Since everyone in the family liked water sports, Provincetown conveniently suited them all, and they rented a house on the beach for at least a month, after Rockwell had secured use of a studio nearby. The family arrived to discover that, totally coincidentally, Mary Amy Orpen and her college roommate had rented the cottage next door. The Rockwells and the two young women went sailing together, where Mary Amy noticed how relaxed the water made Mary Rockwell. The girls left soon after the Rockwells arrived, which is when disaster, as the sons recall, struck. “My parents were riding bikes, and the front wheel of the bike my dad had rented collapsed suddenly, with no warning, throwing him over the handlebars,” Peter remembers vividly. Rockwell broke his upper jaw badly, a complicated fracture that involved a delicate repair to the maxillae as well as replacing the teeth he had knocked out. Because it was the Fourth of July, no dentist could be found, and Rockwell rode around in a taxi, ending up a few hours away in Hyannis before someone was found to wire the artist’s jaw shut. Luckily, a dental surgeon who had worked on veterans with war wounds was in the area, and the specialist operated on the artist. Although Rockwell pretended to be sick when he needed deadline extensions, he was especially reticent about real medical problems, and he strove successfully to keep this latest injury under wraps. Pictures of his face before and after the accident, however, show the slightly realigned bone structure.