Norman Rockwell Read Online Free Page B

portrait the young critic studies so assiduously, Rockwell used his wife (and Jarvis’s mother), Mary.
    The timing of this particular painting, in terms of familial harmony, was way off. Mary had been struggling valiantly against alcoholism and depression—possibly a bipolar illness—for at least five years. The family had been racked by the demise of their formerly predictable upper-middle-class home, as the mother, previously the anchor of their household, suddenly needed all the tending. Boarding school plans had been upended in an attempt to rally round her, trips were rescheduled, tremendous amounts of money were poured into treatments, and finally, a permanent move was undertaken from Arlington, Vermont, where the family had lived since 1939, to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, when it became clear that Mary’s treatments at the Austen Riggs Center would be long-term. Unknown to the family, as they struggled to adjust to Mary’s illness Rockwell suffered a simultaneous spate of suicidal thoughts.
    Jarvis, however, could give both his parents a run for their money, and in terms of expensive sessions with mental healthcare specialists, he did exactly that. From his earliest years, he was a particularly complicated member of the family: “I never caught on to what you’re supposed to do in school,” he remembers. “So it kind of never made sense to me, from the beginning.” Born in 1931, by 1938 Jarvis had been displaced by two younger brothers, and as he approached second grade, his parents were contemplating yet another major dislocation in his young life. The next year, they would decide to leave the sophisticated enclave of New Rochelle, New York, to make their home in Arlington, Vermont. A greater contrast is hard to imagine, at least on the face of it. New Rochelle fed on the overspill from Manhattan, seeing itself as a haven for worldly artists, entertainers, and intellectuals who wanted to be within commuting distance of the city, while enjoying the yacht club environment of what many treated as a wealthy distant suburb of the city. Even at his young age, Jarvis would feel the shock of adjusting to a bucolic life after the faster pace of his earlier years.
    Between the move at age nine and posing for
The Art Critic
immediately prior to his twenty-third birthday, Rockwell’s eldest son re-trod many of his father’s steps, though too often, to Jarvis, they seemed to be missteps. He, too, had dropped out of high school; he, too, attended not only art school but his father’s own, the Art Students League in New York City. And though “Pop,” the name the boys conferred on their father when they became adolescents, ostensibly encouraged Jarvis’s efforts, praising lavishly to others his son’s work, the young artist grew up feeling distant from the father whose somewhat vague friendliness left his son desperate for a closer connection.
    By 1954, Jarvis had been in and out of art schools, the Air Force, and psychiatric treatment. He was, in the lingo of a later age, trying to find himself. And he was trying hard to understand how to position himself as an aspiring artist in an art world that rejected as inconsequential the achievements of his father, whose technique Jarvis at least deeply appreciated, but whose storytelling in oils found expression, after all, only on mass-reproduced magazine covers. As soon as he was finished posing for Pop this time, Jarvis planned to head off for the Boston Museum of Art School, a more competitive program than any his father had attended.
    No account exists of Rockwell’s inspiration for
The Art Critic.
Preparing even more feverishly than he did for most of his covers, however, he went through dozens of charcoal sketches, color renderings, and redirection of the mise-en-scène. The flirtatious, attractive woman for whom Mary Rockwell posed took the form of at least ten variations alone, from an early frowning hausfrau to the beautiful damsel that preceded the final image.