American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (5 page)

Just four months later, in September, a terrible depression swept the country. The Panic of 1873 began with the collapse of the Philadelphia investment house of Jay Cooke & Co., which had financed the construction of the country’s railroads and assumed with unearned confidence that money for laying down new tracks would never run out. Its miscalculation resulted in its ruin, set off other bank failures around the country, and brought on what remains known as the Long Depression. Hill, chased by creditors and unable to make his rent, moved his family back to Yonkers, where his widowed father still resided, albeit in rather modest circumstances. The father rented a room in the home of an English-born couple and scraped by as “a furniture dealer.”
6

Howard Hill rented a poky little dwelling on Woodworth Avenue, which ran along the banks of the Hudson.
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His immediate plan was to earn a living by obtaining commissions from well-to-do farmers in Yonkers. He would traipse from house to house, offering his services and mentioning his unique talent for painting hens and roosters. On countless afternoons he could be found sitting in a barnyard, sketching and sketching, trying to capture a pair of white chickens scratching in the packed dirt or a large dog sleeping in the shade of a tree. Compared to his earlier work—the cozy families of grown birds and chicks—some of his later paintings convey a nervous energy. The animals can seem more isolated: a chicken pecking beside an open barn door, a rooster with a spiky red crown appearing a little alarmed.

He became known as the town eccentric, a moody, unkempt man who alienated most everyone he met. Evenings, he would head into town and make the rounds of the taverns. Invariably, he would return home sloshed, tripping over kitchen chairs and muttering obscenities. His children were woken in the middle of the night by the sound of him clomping around and grew to fear him.

Stories circulated about his lapses and misadventures. He once took his children into the village and returned home without them. When he was in high spirits, he liked to buy up surplus goods. There was the time he returned from a shopping spree with twelve pairs of children’s shoes, all of them the same size.

Inevitably, his career withered. He sold so few pictures he was reduced to painting houses to make ends meet. Then he had an idea: perhaps there was profit to be made in turning out paintings in bulk. He would devote himself to “schemes to fill a salable rectangle,” as the critic Julian Bell once said of another artist, in another context. Borrowing the production-line method he had learned during his stint at Currier & Ives, he enlisted his children as his staff artists.

And so he became the head of a workshop, putting his children to work in the production of sentimental pictures of Indian maidens on moonlit lakes and tearful mothers bidding their grown sons farewell. His usual practice was to have the children sit at a long wooden table. Hill would sit at the head of the table and pass along a canvas on which he had laid in the background. One child would add a moon, another a lake, another a forest, and so on, until the painting was almost done and Hill had only to add a few touches and his signature. He was paid as much as twenty-five dollars for a picture that came with a frame.

By now his older children were out of the house and faring well in the workaday world. His oldest son, Thomas J. Hill, had an art career of his own. He had trained in his father’s studio as an
animalière
, or animal painter. The first painting he exhibited at the National Academy—this was in 1876—was listed in the catalog as
Chipmunks Home
and offered for sale, for one hundred dollars. Unlike his father, who had made his second and last appearance at the National Academy in 1866, the younger Hill would continue to show in its annual surveys.
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Although he lacked his father’s depth as a painter, he was a considerate and thoughtful man who was well-liked by his peers, traits which in art, as in everything else, can carry a person a certain distance.

Howard Hill’s problems worsened considerably in 1886. On the morning of April 25, his wife died of pneumonia, aged fifty-seven. Pneumonia before the discovery of penicillin was a devastating disease that brought on violent fevers and sweats. It could kill you in a matter of days and Ann Hill’s death certificate notes that she had been sick for only “Seven or Eight days.”
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She died at home, on Woodworth Avenue, and was buried in the yard of the Episcopal church to which she belonged. The stone that marks her grave bears a pithy, poignant inscription: “Momma.”

Four months later, another tragedy befell Hill. Thomas J. Hill—his eldest son, the artist, now twenty-nine—died of the same disease that killed his mother. He had been sick with pneumonia for only “Three days,” according to his death certificate.
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These were grievous times for Howard Hill. His wife was dead and his son Tom had joined her, both of them lying in the small, grassy churchyard in the middle of town. Unable to keep house, exhausted by the pressures of trying to earn his living as an artist, Hill spent his last year and a half reduced to living as a vagrant. Traveling with little more than his jars of paint and his brushes and his candles, he moved between rooming houses in New York and Yonkers. He had no home address because he had no home. It went on that like that, week after week.

One Monday in February 1888, Hill went to New York “on business” and returned to Yonkers one week later, at midnight. The morning after his return, according to the local newspaper, “he was found in an epileptic fit”—presumably he suffered a stroke. He died a day later, on March 6, 1888, at five o’clock in the morning, at the boarding house of Mrs. Nagel, on New Main Street. He was fifty-seven years old. He was buried at St. John’s Cemetery, in an unmarked grave.
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Two days later, the Great Blizzard of 1888 descended, terrifying the people of Yonkers with howling winds and endless snowfall and causing all the birds to freeze to death.

*   *   *

Here, then, is Norman Rockwell’s mother. Here is Nancy Hill. Born in Hoboken on March 6, 1866, she was the fifth of Howard Hill’s six children. The Tuesday on which her father died was her twenty-second birthday. From that day on she was an orphan. At the time, she was living in a boardinghouse on Ravine Avenue in Yonkers, sharing a room with her older sister Katie, a teacher.
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A petite, darkly pretty woman, Nancy already had a boyfriend who was precisely what she wanted: he was kind and dependable. He was someone who could carry her away from the squalor of her past, away from the drinking binges and the chickens and roosters, away from the whole miserable experience of art. She never wanted to inhale the greasy scent of oil paint again.

*   *   *

Nancy found the perfect suitor when she met Jarvis Waring Rockwell—Norman Rockwell’s father—who went by his middle name. He was a salesman for a textile company in Manhattan. He, too, grew up in Yonkers, but in the good part of town, in a stately house at 98 Ashburton Avenue, never having to worry about money.
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Waring had a handsome face with brown eyes and a substantial mustache kept neatly trimmed. His speaking voice was deep and he sang bass in the church choir of his youth. When he was in his early twenties, he joined several amateur singing groups and his appearances were noted respectfully in the pages of
The Yonkers Statesman
. He warbled with the Canoe Club Quintet and sang in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, including the first production of
The Mikado
in Yonkers.

Born on December 18, 1867, the youngest of three children, Waring grew up in a family that thankfully for him was less colorful than his wife’s. His father, John William Rockwell, was a wholesale coal dealer who ran his own business out of a landmark building, 1 Broadway in Manhattan. His mother, Phebe Boyce Waring, can fairly be described as Yonkers aristocracy. She was descended from the founder of the Waring Manufacturing Company, which was once the nation’s largest hat maker and at its peak turned out seven thousand hats a day.

In the summer of 1891 Waring was twenty-three; Nancy was twenty-five. It is not known how they met, only that they had been dating for a few years and their relatives wondered if they would ever marry. Waring was willing to do whatever Nancy wanted. She wanted to marry that summer up in Crompton, Rhode Island, where she was living in the house of her older sister. And she wanted to marry in the Episcopal Church, which was fine with Waring although he had grown up attending services at the First Presbyterian Church. News of the nuptials made page one of
The Yonkers Statesman
, which reported, “The bride was attired in a handsome costume of white, with veil, and carried a bouquet of white roses … After a wedding tour, Mr. and Mrs. Rockwell will reside in New York City.”
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The newlyweds rented an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a narrow brownstone at 206 West 103rd Street, off Amsterdam Avenue. They had been married for little more than a year when Nancy gave birth at home to their first son, Jarvis Waring Rockwell, Jr., on September 29, 1892.

In less than a year, Nancy was pregnant again. On February 3, 1894, a second son was born. It was her turn to pick a name. Astoundingly, instead of naming him after her artist-father Howard or her adored brother Thomas J. Hill, she named him after a man she had never met—one Captain Norman Spencer Perceval, a minor British nobleman who had married her mother’s sister. The captain was still alive at the time, ensconced on Lowndes Street in London, and he appealed to Nancy’s nostalgia for an England she had never visited except in the mists of her imagination. Perhaps she hoped that Captain Perceval would leave some money to her son, or perhaps it was enough for her to know that she and her newborn, Norman Perceval Rockwell, by virtue of the name she had given him, were now linked for the ages to a name out of British royal history. She no doubt would have been thrilled to learn that Captain Norman Spencer Perceval was linked to the future Diana Spencer, princess of Wales, by a mere twenty-one degrees of genealogical separation.
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Mary Ann Rockwell, the artist’s mother, later known as Nancy

Rockwell always hated his middle name and believed that Perceval was about as embarrassing as any word ever appended to a boy.
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His mother was constantly reminding him to spell it correctly, the way that Captain Perceval did—the captain spelled it
Perceval
, as opposed to the common spelling of
Percival
. This may explain why Rockwell actually misspelled his own middle name in his autobiography. He spelled it throughout as
Percevel
, as if so anxious about overlooking the letter
e
that he inserted one in the place of every vowel.

*   *   *

People need something to carry their fantasies, and for Nancy Rockwell the lines and bloodlines of family trees were a convenient conveyor. In later life, she came to believe that her father, poor Howard Hill, was descended from British royalty. “My father’s great, great, great grandmother was Lady Elizabeth Howard, she was beheaded,” she noted in a letter to her daughter-in-law in 1946. At the time, she was reading a new historical novel about the girlhood of Elizabeth I,
Young Bess
, by Margaret Irwin. She highly recommended it, “if you wish to read something about my father’s ancestors.”
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Rockwell, by contrast, had little interest in his ancestors. When he thought of his origins, he preferred to dwell on his artistic origins and various painter-gods to whom he felt connected. They were a far-flung lot, ranging from European masters like Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rembrandt, and Jean-François Millet to the American illustrator of pirates, Howard Pyle. The history of painting is its own extended family and the one from which Rockwell believed he inherited his best qualities.

TWO

NOT A NORMAN ROCKWELL CHILDHOOD

(1894 TO 1911)

In his later years, when Rockwell tried to picture his parents, one memory invariably sprang to mind. It is early evening in New York City and Norman, who is maybe ten or eleven, is sitting in the dim stairwell of the brownstone building where the family lived. He hears the front door of the building creak open and the sound of his father coming up the stairs. Waring, a textile salesman, is tired from his day at work and the hour-long ride on the trolley. He enters the apartment and Norman can hear him ask in his deep baritone, “Well, now, Nancy, how are you?”

“Oh, Waring, I’ve had such a hard day. I’m just worn out.”

“Now, Nancy, you just lie down on the couch there and I’ll get a cold towel for your head.”

Waring would close the door and all Norman could hear was the sound of his mother’s lamentations. To his annoyance, his father would sit at her side, hat in his hand, dark eyes filled with understanding and sympathy, as if he had never heard her story before.