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

was constantly threatening to give it up and move back to his native California.
    At five each day, Forsythe would walk home to his house on Elm Street and be greeted by Cotta, his wife. Rockwell stayed in his studio until around six or, in the dead of winter, until daylight gave out, and then returned home to spend the evening with his parents. In the summer of 1915, after a little more than a year of life at Brown Lodge, they moved to a rooming house they considered a bit nicer: Edgewood Hall, at 39 Edgewood Park, near Webster Avenue and the trolley. It was run by a married couple, Fred and Sadie Miller, and advertised as “a quiet family hotel,” with “handsome furnished rooms.” 6
    In October, the local paper reported that “Jarvis Rockwell, of Edgewood Hall, was tendered a birthday party by his fellow guests at the hotel.” 7 Some of the lodgers, including Jarvis’s girlfriend and future wife, were young women living on their own, but there were also families with school-age children. It was here, at Edgewood Hall, that Rockwell met Billy Payne, a young lodger who would come to play a large role in his work, a handsome, athletic eleven-year-old with reddish-blond hair and a generous smattering of freckles.
    Rockwell was relieved to have found a model as talented as Billy, who soon was dropping by his studio almost every day after school. He didn’t have much family in town. His only sibling was a much-older half sister from his father’s first marriage; she lived in Indiana and saw him infrequently. Rockwell, by contrast, seemed to have unlimited time for Billy, so long as the boy was willing to hold still as Rockwell sketched.
    To be sure, Billy was not the most disciplined model. He could tire of holding expressions and poses, or be overcome with a sudden and irrepressible desire to throw an object across a room. But Rockwell devised a way to help him concentrate. Instead of writing a check at the end of the day—the pay was fifty cents an hour—he piled up a stack of quarters on his work table. Billy received a quarter every thirty minutes, presuming he was still on the modeling stand and not making water balloons at the sink. The method was surprisingly effective and Rockwell used it with repeated success.
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    In February 1916 Rockwell turned twenty-two and appeared in a three-man show at the New Rochelle Public Library, along with Clyde Forsythe and a young artist named Ernest Albert, Jr. While his coexhibitors were represented by a few dozen landscapes—Forsythe’s entries included such western scenes as Santa Monica Shore , Redondo Cliffs , and Twin Peaks —Rockwell had zero interest in painting pictures devoid of people, which is how he thought of landscape painting. Art without a face. He had fifteen works in the show, a mix of illustrations from St. Nicholas magazine and portraits of acquaintances, including a sensitive portrait of his young friend Billy Payne.
    The show generated a flurry of publicity, at least locally. The New Rochelle Tattler , which, conveniently, was located in an office adjacent to Rockwell’s studio, gave him a full page. It probably helped that Adelaide Klenke, who wrote the piece and edited the Tattler , already knew and liked Rockwell. She was a few years older than he, blond and still single, the daughter of German émigrés, and he found her amusing. He frequently quoted a less than flattering comment she had made about his appearance. She told him he had “the eyes of an angel and the neck of a chicken.”
    In her article for the Tattler , she was not so mocking, describing Rockwell as tall and thin, with a “big, bass drum laugh.” 8 Although he had never been west of New Jersey, his comments made him sound like a world traveler. “I intended giving up illustration this winter and going to Norway for several months and studying the Norwegian and Swedish genre painters,” he announced, “but my contracts interfered and my work piled up.” He