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

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.” 17
    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.

 
    THREE
    THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE
    (SEPTEMBER 1911 TO 1912)
    In October 1911 Rockwell enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, which occupied a palatial building on West Fifty-seventh Street. The League liked to think of itself as a progressive place, the antiacademic academy. It issued no grades, kept no attendance records, and prescribed no specific course of study. Students could sign up on a monthly basis with any artist-professors who interested them or drop classes with impunity. For Rockwell, the League was appealing because it was the only art school in the city where book illustration was taken seriously. Howard Pyle had been a student a generation earlier, as had Frederic Remington, and Rockwell was eager to will himself into their lineage.
    At the League, Rockwell found himself among teachers and art students who provided him with his first taste of New York bohemia. Everyone, it seemed, espoused radical politics and read poetry and had seen the latest issue of Mother Earth , Emma Goldman’s anarchist magazine. This is not to imply that Rockwell became a teenage bohemian. At seventeen, he was one of the youngest students at the League, just out of high school and inexperienced in the ways of the world. Most of his classmates were in their twenties and living on their own. They came to the League not only to study art, but for the privilege of being young and penniless in New York. Rockwell, by contrast, was still living with his parents in sleepy Mamaroneck and commuting to the city by train. On Fridays, he would diligently lug home his portfolio and show his parents his latest figure studies. Against all reason he hoped to impress them, to justify his presence at school. Unlike the National Academy of Design, the League charged tuition—eight dollars a month for each class, which was a sacrifice for his family.
    Among his classmates, he quickly became known as an exceptional draftsman if a somewhat awkward presence. At this point, he had curly hair and was so gangly he appeared to be taller than he was (he stood just under five foot eleven). He concentrated on his work with a single-mindedness that earned him the nickname “The Deacon.” Women were among the students at the League, but he was not friendly with any one in particular. By his own admission, he was surprised by the work habits of his fellow students, so many of whom seemed capricious, even reckless, working when the whim took them, even in the middle of the night. Rockwell, by contrast, would never work through the night. And he would never miss lunch.
    He was aware he was different from the other students, perhaps more ambitious, or just more inhibited, and he felt excluded from the camaraderie of school life.