Norman Rockwell

Prim and proper Betsy Campbell, 5, didn’t easily smile on demand. Though she was with three strangers—a grown-up couple and a young boy—the atmosphere around her seemed light-hearted and festive. She held a bright–colored balloon in one hand and a yummy bag of popcorn in the other.

Suddenly, a man dashed up, grabbed her popcorn, and threw it all over her!

“That’s when he got the expression he needed from me,” recalls the now 53-year-old Betsy Campbell Manning.

“He” was well-known painter and American icon Norman Rockwell. The setting was a posed scene for one of a series of illustrations called Circus.

“Mr. Rockwell would improvise to get what he wanted from people who modeled for him,” Manning says.

Much is known about the homespun, cozy work of Rockwell, deceased now for 22 years. “He has taught a generation of Americans to see,” Wright Morris, the acclaimed author and photographer who documented middle-class America, once wrote in a 1957 critical essay. Better make that almost five generations now. And most would guess the man behind the wistful presences on canvas probably was very much like his subject matter—warm, decent, down-to-earth, hardworking, patriotic, optimistic, idealistic, friendly, heroic. Well, yes, he was.

The townspeople of tiny Arlington, Vt., where he lived with his family for 14 years (1939-53), and later of Stockbridge, Mass., (his home for the last 25 years of his life), knew him as a modest, retiring man not given to extravagance or grandiosity, like so many of his contemporaries in the arts. Richard Reeves of The New York Times Magazine claimed, “Norman Rockwell is exactly like a Norman Rockwell … a tattered smock upon a stick, as incredibly skinny, pigeon-toed and Adam’s-appled as ever. Frail and small-boyish, if that’s possible at his age (77 in 1971).”

Rockwell, arguably the best-loved American artist ever, was born in New York City in 1894, the son of a devoted New York agent for a Philadelphia cotton-goods firm. With only limited formal art training, Rockwell began illustrating for Boy’s Life when he was just 17. By age 22 he was painting his first cover for The Saturday Evening Post. Accounts vary—from 317 to 321 to 361—on the actual number of Post covers he did, but it’s safe to say the quantity was prolific.

The 1930s and ’40s are considered Rockwell’s prime years, and it was then that he gained major national attention for his patriotic posters, the Four Freedoms, which generated more than $132 million for America’s war effort in 1943. He continued doing Post covers until 1963, then illustrated for Look magazine for another 10 years. In all, Rockwell rendered close to 4,000 pieces of work during a 68-year period.

Insight into the man, as well as a taste of his fine-edged sense of humor, is gained from a quote he gave to Esquire magazine in 1962: “Long ago I used to kneel down and pray before starting a Post cover. Now, when you look at some of them, you begin to wonder about the power of prayer.”

Claire Williams, a guide with the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., first modeled for the famous artist when she was 29. “He was fun, he loved to act out things,” says Williams, 71. “Though there were always two photographers at his sessions, he always felt he could look into people’s faces and see expressions the camera never caught.” This is undoubtedly one reason why Rockwell used live models until 1936.

An artist’s eye is not often something onlookers are privy to understanding. “He might take your hairdo and put it on somebody else, glasses on someone that never wore glasses, noses—it would change the personality of a person,” Williams notes. “He was using the model for what he had in mind.”

The second of Rockwell’s three sons, Tom, recalls occasional visits as a child to his father’s workplace—a converted carriage house-turned-art studio on the estate that once belonged to politician Aaron Burr—where the productive painter executed his heartbeat-of-America pieces.

“Sometimes as a little kid, I’d go out to see him in the studio,” recounts Tom, 67, an author of 14 children’s books. “He had a long built-in bench under a big window, and I’d sit on that bench and knock my feet against it, watching him paint. If he was really absorbed in something, like a head, that required a lot of concentration, then he might want to be alone. He used to play the radio. If you came in and, let’s say, he had the Dodgers game on, he’d never know what the score was. It was just sort of background. My mother used to read to him a lot. And of course he did listen to that.”

But whether with people or alone, one factor remained constant: Rockwell painted incessantly. Stories abound of the illustrator diving into his work with such grueling purpose and dedication that he would barely surface for air. An account from the February 1943 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine states, “The only thing that annoys him is having his work disturbed. He works every day, including Sundays and holidays. He works until he nearly breaks down …”

“He really was a workaholic,” says Tom about life in the Rockwell home. “He was very concentrated—he’d go out to the studio in the morning, go back out after dinner, and the same with Christmas.”

“I don’t know why I work so hard,” the famous artist once said after spending half of one Christmas day at his easel. “I’ve made enough money.”

The day-to-day handling of the children naturally fell to Mary, Rockwell’s second wife, whom he married in 1930 and who died unexpectedly in 1959. “My mother did the driving and things like that,” adds Tom.

Speaking of driving, Tom tells an amusing story about his dad. You can almost envision it as a Rockwell painting in itself.

“In his later life, at Stockbridge, he took a nap everyday,” begins Tom. “Whenever he had to go somewhere else, he’d get someone to drive him and he would sleep in the back seat. When it came time to buy a new car, he went out and tried out their back seats, because he wanted something big enough in which he could comfortably take a nap. What he bought was a great big Oldsmobile. That was in the ’50s, when they had huge cars.”

Pets were a part of the Rockwell homestead. “One time my wife found a dog wandering around in Pittsfield with no collar or anything,” Tom continues. “She brought him home and that was his dog—we called him “Pitter” for Pittsfield—for a long time. In some of the pictures you can see him. He’s sort of white and looks like a beagle, but a little bigger than a beagle. It seemed he almost always had a dog around. He liked dogs. Well, you can tell that from his pictures.”

But if you think Rockwell was a namby-pamby, goody two-shoes homebody, you might be shocked to hear that in his 30s, he and his first wife, Irene, made several trips to Paris from their New Rochelle, N.Y., home. He considered that era, in the prime of the Roaring ’20s, “a mad social whirl.” Picture this: the dashing Rockwell, then making $45,000 a year, stepping out in opera hat, cape, and silver-headed walking stick in his top-down Packard roadster. “I went high, wide, and handsome,” he once said of those times.

Despite his obsessive preoccupation with painting, Rockwell did have interests away from the easel.

“Up in Vermont,” says Williams, who became friendly with several Rockwell models around Arlington, “they say he loved to square dance.” The rug-cutting illustrator also could be found on occasion on the tennis courts, fishing with a friend, or in later years, taking his daily bike ride with third wife Molly, whom he married in 1961.

But you’d ultimately have to figure that a man who genuinely interspersed his dialogue with apple-pie epithets like “gosh” and “oh, gee,” was also eminently capable of delivering a truly modest take on himself. After all, this is the man who painted America.

“I like doing what I do and know not how to do anything else,” Rockwell once said. “I’d just love to do it a lot better.”

Alan Ross, a freelance writer living in Monteagle, Tenn., is the son of Alex Ross, a contemporary of Rockwell’s, who painted 130 covers for Good Housekeeping magazine from 1942-54.

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