Free American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon

space of a magazine cover.
    Compared to his fellow illustrators in New Rochelle, symbols of success who lived in Tudor mansions overlooking the Long Island Sound or rolling woodlands in the Wykagyl neighborhood north of downtown, Rockwell lived modestly. He did not own a tract of land. He did not employ servants. Rather, he was still residing with his penny-scrimping parents and his brother, Jarvis, at Brown Lodge, in the city’s business district.
    On weekday mornings, Rockwell’s father and brother commuted by train into New York City, to their respective jobs in Lower Manhattan. Rockwell did not have to venture that far. He could walk from Brown Lodge to the studio he rented at 78 North Avenue. He usually started his work day by drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola, which helped him wake up, and mulling over the painting in progress on his easel. He would try to figure out which part of it didn’t work and he always found something. This provided him with an entry point back into the painting and opened up a space of concentration into which he could disappear for hours.
    He was separated from the other illustrators in New Rochelle not only by his youth and his inexperience, but by his lack of interest in their notion of glamour, their sense of the things that make life worthwhile. For starters, he did not care for golf and could not understand how certain men played round after round at the Wykagyl Country Club. Most of them were married and their wives and girlfriends were themselves somewhat celebrated and ogled—they were the women who had modeled for the Gibson Girl and the Fade-Away Girl and all the other new kinds of modern girls.
    Rockwell, by contrast, continued to work seven days a week and to produce illustrations of boys. Skating boys and brawling boys and boys sitting around the proverbial campfire. He had already drawn more baseball diamonds than he could count. Ditto for shipwrecks and deserted islands. In the two years since he had left the Art Students League, he had come to know the art editors at various magazines and secured a steady influx of assignments. His work for Boys’ Life led to assignments from other children’s magazines, such as St. Nicholas and The Youth’s Companion , and though the magazines were competing for junior subscribers, no one stopped Rockwell from publishing his work in all of them.
    The now-forgotten Youth’s Companion , a weekly priced at seven cents an issue, had the largest circulation of the children’s magazines. It was published in Boston, by Perry Mason & Co. (from which the television attorney derived his name). St. Nicholas , by contrast , a New York–based monthly priced at a relatively steep twenty-five cents, continues to be called the best children’s magazine ever. Published by Century Company, it was the little person’s version of The Century Magazine , a mix of literature and beautifully drawn illustrations in which Rockwell along with the rest of his generation gained his first excited glimpse of pictures by Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish.

    The Magic Football (“I thought you were wrong”) ran as a story illustration in St. Nicholas , the best of the children’s magazines, in December 1914. The medium is oil on canvas en grisaille.

    Rockwell was pleased when he was given a full page in the Christmas 1914 issue of St. Nicholas magazine. 3 His illustration, which accompanied a story called “The Magic Football,” shows a boy of perhaps twelve or thirteen perched on the edge of a Windsor chair, mesmerized by the appearance of a male fairy with pointy ears, a long nose, and a tall black hat floating a few feet above his head. Sunlight pours into the study from a window on the left and fades as it moves across the room, touching the boy’s face and the arms of his chair. The picture is astonishingly precocious. Departing from the text of the story he was purportedly illustrating, Rockwell furnishes the room with the trappings of a cultured