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

oil paint again.
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    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. 13
    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.” 14
    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. 15

    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. 16 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