Read Online American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon - Free Book Online
Authors: Deborah Solomon
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believe that abstract painting and figurative painting were not as easily divisible as critics pretended. But, in 1913, as a young illustrator just beginning his career, abstract painting did not speak to his needs. Abstraction broke the smooth surface of art, searched out depths; Rockwell, a repressed nineteen-year-old, was scared of depths. He preferred the reassuring pleasures of the unbroken surface.
Still, the Armory Show reminded him of the possibilities of painting, the largeness and radiance of it, beside which life seemed so precarious. On March 18, 1913, just as the show closed, his grandfather John W. Rockwell died suddenly at Roosevelt Hospital in New York. This was the grandfather who years earlier had bequeathed Rockwell the hand-me-down coat that he saw as emblematic of his shamed boyhood, the too-large overcoat with the moss-green velvet collar that had elicited mocking laughter from his schoolmates and which, in the end, he had burned. 12
Most students at the Art Students League stayed for three years, but, according to school records, Rockwell was there for less than two. 13 By the time the Armory Show closed, he was feeling restless not only with his studies but with his job at Boys’ Life . He longed to do more meaningful work, to reflect contemporary life, and to have his art seen by someone besides twelve-year-old Boy Scouts.
To this end, he befriended John Fleming Wilson, a popular novelist and Princeton graduate who lived in Riverside, California, and was roughly twenty years his senior. Wilson’s stories appeared in The Saturday Evening Post , which gave him a near-heroic stature in Rockwell’s eyes. His lesser stories ran in Boys’ Life , and Rockwell came to know him after illustrating his story, “Waves of the Moon,” for the September 1913 issue. For this he provided a painting of a lanky Scout in a pointed felt hat, holding the steering wheel of a ship. It was his first-ever magazine cover.
He later recalled meeting Wilson on one of the writer’s many trips to New York over a breakfast of two fried eggs and a double whiskey—Wilson ordered for both of them. In coming months, Wilson urged Rockwell to shed his cloistered ways. Let me show you life, he would say, and Rockwell would laugh tensely. Their jaunts around Manhattan took Rockwell away from his studio, away from his fixed routine. But he believed something large was at stake.
Wilson promised to help get him an assignment at a major magazine. Perhaps at The Saturday Evening Post , where he had published the first of his many “Tad Sheldon, Boy Scout” stories. Wilson also wrote pieces of reportage and he mentioned to Rockwell that he was planning a trip down to Panama, to report on the construction of the canal and the thousands of men involved in the effort. The previous year, his article “Panama, City of Madmen,” had appeared in Lippincott’s. 14 Wilson suggested that Rockwell come along on his next Panamanian expedition and do the illustrations. Rockwell acquired a pith helmet and a pair of leather sandals, imagined his first ship journey, counted the days until their departure.
But then one day he visited the hotel on Broadway where Wilson had been staying; the writer had checked out and left no forwarding address. “I was crushed,” Rockwell recalled. “I went home and sat in my empty studio amidst the litter of my tropic gear. My mind was empty. Everything—all my dreams of becoming a great illustrator, of working for the big magazines—shattered, lost.
“I guess I came as near to having a nervous breakdown as I ever have. I couldn’t work. Or sleep. Or eat. Or go out anywhere. I wouldn’t talk about it. I just sat in my studio, staring at the pigeons strutting on the ledge outside my window.
“Finally, my father sent me away to the mountains for a month,” Rockwell recalled. He stayed in a room on the Jessup farm where his family had summered long ago, up in Warwick, New York. “I took long walks
Still, the Armory Show reminded him of the possibilities of painting, the largeness and radiance of it, beside which life seemed so precarious. On March 18, 1913, just as the show closed, his grandfather John W. Rockwell died suddenly at Roosevelt Hospital in New York. This was the grandfather who years earlier had bequeathed Rockwell the hand-me-down coat that he saw as emblematic of his shamed boyhood, the too-large overcoat with the moss-green velvet collar that had elicited mocking laughter from his schoolmates and which, in the end, he had burned. 12
Most students at the Art Students League stayed for three years, but, according to school records, Rockwell was there for less than two. 13 By the time the Armory Show closed, he was feeling restless not only with his studies but with his job at Boys’ Life . He longed to do more meaningful work, to reflect contemporary life, and to have his art seen by someone besides twelve-year-old Boy Scouts.
To this end, he befriended John Fleming Wilson, a popular novelist and Princeton graduate who lived in Riverside, California, and was roughly twenty years his senior. Wilson’s stories appeared in The Saturday Evening Post , which gave him a near-heroic stature in Rockwell’s eyes. His lesser stories ran in Boys’ Life , and Rockwell came to know him after illustrating his story, “Waves of the Moon,” for the September 1913 issue. For this he provided a painting of a lanky Scout in a pointed felt hat, holding the steering wheel of a ship. It was his first-ever magazine cover.
He later recalled meeting Wilson on one of the writer’s many trips to New York over a breakfast of two fried eggs and a double whiskey—Wilson ordered for both of them. In coming months, Wilson urged Rockwell to shed his cloistered ways. Let me show you life, he would say, and Rockwell would laugh tensely. Their jaunts around Manhattan took Rockwell away from his studio, away from his fixed routine. But he believed something large was at stake.
Wilson promised to help get him an assignment at a major magazine. Perhaps at The Saturday Evening Post , where he had published the first of his many “Tad Sheldon, Boy Scout” stories. Wilson also wrote pieces of reportage and he mentioned to Rockwell that he was planning a trip down to Panama, to report on the construction of the canal and the thousands of men involved in the effort. The previous year, his article “Panama, City of Madmen,” had appeared in Lippincott’s. 14 Wilson suggested that Rockwell come along on his next Panamanian expedition and do the illustrations. Rockwell acquired a pith helmet and a pair of leather sandals, imagined his first ship journey, counted the days until their departure.
But then one day he visited the hotel on Broadway where Wilson had been staying; the writer had checked out and left no forwarding address. “I was crushed,” Rockwell recalled. “I went home and sat in my empty studio amidst the litter of my tropic gear. My mind was empty. Everything—all my dreams of becoming a great illustrator, of working for the big magazines—shattered, lost.
“I guess I came as near to having a nervous breakdown as I ever have. I couldn’t work. Or sleep. Or eat. Or go out anywhere. I wouldn’t talk about it. I just sat in my studio, staring at the pigeons strutting on the ledge outside my window.
“Finally, my father sent me away to the mountains for a month,” Rockwell recalled. He stayed in a room on the Jessup farm where his family had summered long ago, up in Warwick, New York. “I took long walks
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