American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Read Online Free PDF Page A

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. 8 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.” 9 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. 10
    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. 11 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.
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    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. 12
    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