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

life—there are leather-bound books arrayed above the mantelpiece, as well as framed reproductions of museum paintings, including a Rembrandt self-portrait and Jean-François Millet’s Gleaners . What’s interesting is how Rockwell takes an assignment for a commercial magazine and bends it to accommodate his own artistic preoccupations. Everything is here—his love of Millet and Rembrandt, his clarity, books, a boy, a magic hat. A story can be an opportunity for self-expression, even if the story was written by someone else.
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    In addition to its illustrators, New Rochelle also had an impressive population of cartoonists. They included Frederick Opper, Clare Briggs, and Clyde Forsythe, all of whom had gained a new visibility as a result of the circulation fight pitting Joseph Pulitzer’s World against William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal . Like a character in a cartoon strip of his own devising, Hearst was constantly scheming to lure cartoonists away from The World . It was the age of “yellow journalism,” a phrase that originated from the popular Yellow Kid strip that for a while appeared—in competing versions—in both the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers.
    Rockwell, who had drawn caricatures in his childhood and had a natural gift for comic anecdote, was well aware of the artistic possibilities of the Sunday funnies. He recognized that comic strips were not just a series of laugh-out-loud jokes; they represented a morally coherent universe. In what is probably his most-quoted statement about his art, Rockwell wrote in his autobiography: “Maybe as I grew up and found that the world wasn’t the perfectly pleasant place I had thought it to be I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and so painted only the ideal aspects of it—pictures in which there were no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers, in which, on the contrary, there were only Foxy Grandpas who played baseball with kids.” 4
    Self-centered mothers? He certainly described his own that way. Foxy Grandpas? Rockwell was presumably referring to Carl Schultze’s Foxy Grandpa , one of the early classics of the Sunday funnies. It first appeared in The New York Herald in 1900, when he was six years old; its protagonist was a clever old man who, from one day to the next, outsmarts his two pesky grandsons, Chub and Bunt. Unlike other cartoon strips, whose humor derived from subversive acts or emotions—rage, madness, sloppiness, screaming, etc.—Foxy Grandpa offered up a gentler universe in which any threat of chaos was neatly resolved by its elderly hero.
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    Once he settled in New Rochelle, Rockwell quickly became best friends with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe, who happened to have a studio in the same building as he on North Avenue. 5 At lunchtime, Rockwell would walk down the hall to talk to Forsythe, who would regale him with amusing stories. Then he would try to drag Forsythe back to his studio, so he could see what he was working on. Rockwell was always asking people what they thought of a particular painting. He had an enormous need for reassurance and found friends who could bolster him up, who were sufficiently accepting to find his insecurity charming. “Give it time,” Forsythe would tell him. “Hell, Lincoln was fifty-one before he was elected president.”
    Forsythe was quite a bit older than Rockwell, nine years, and already established in his career. His daily strip about boxing, The Great White Dope , ran in Pulitzer’s paper, The Evening World. Soon he would create Joe’s Car , which in turn evolved into Joe Jinks , whose title character was a cartoon Everyman, a balding, agitated, henpecked husband with a passion for cars. The strip paid well, but Forsythe’s ambition was to be a painter of the southwestern desert. Every Christmas, he packed up a few canvases and as many rifles and went out west to work on his landscapes. He disparaged his cartoon work and