False Portrait

The main lines of Rockwell’s life are well known. He was born in 1894 in New York. By his teens he was well embarked on his career as an illustrator. He married three times, and had three sons (all with his second wife, Mary). He died in 1978, as probably the best-loved American painter ever. And the prices for his paintings are now putting him in some pretty extraordinary company, sales-wise. On December 4, his famous painting Saying Grace sold for $46 million: the highest amount ever paid at auction for an artwork by an American. Yes, he’s beloved.

In her new biography, however, Deborah Solomon presents a Rockwell we might not be inclined to love so much. Her most shocking claim is that he was sexually attracted to young boys. Almost equally shocking, but more subtle, is her suggestion that Rockwell’s self-absorption had a body count—his behavior led directly or indirectly to at least three ugly deaths.

There is no reason to go along with Solomon about these things. As I’ll show, her arguments—such as they are—are deeply flawed, and she has a pronounced tendency to either distort or ignore evidence to the contrary of her claims. As her interpretation of Rockwell himself is irremediably flawed, so is her interpretation of his art. Hers is a book without merit.

Solomon admits that there’s no evidence Rockwell ever actually molested any children. For example: “there is nothing to suggest that Rockwell’s love of boys ever spilled over into inappropriate touching.” (94) And again: “Once again we are made to wonder whether Rockwell’s complicated interest in the depiction of preadolescent boys was shadowed by pedophilic impulses. But an impulse is not a crime. There is no evidence that he acted on his impulses or behaved in a way that was inappropriate for its time.” (318)

So Solomon says, twice, that there is no evidence that Rockwell acted on any pedophilic impulses. The problem is that there is no evidence that Rockwell ever had any pedophilic impulses. Throughout the book, there are many insinuations and suggestions that Rockwell had “pedophilic impulses.” These two passages, however, make the charge explicit. Where does this pedophilia charge come from? It’s not easy to say. Solomon paints a picture of Rockwell’s life and character such that we are supposed to be able to see the pedophilia emerge. It’s not a deductive case, built on straightforward argument, it’s an impressionistic one, of the sort that biographers must so often build. Despite this difficulty, I can at least take on the bits of Solomon’s case that are most argument-like. Her evidence for Rockwell’s pedophilia consists of three intertwined claims: First, he paints a lot of boys. Second, he forms strong relationships with some of the boys who serve as models for these paintings. Third, some of these paintings are sexually suggestive. Solomon thinks that pedophilia serves as the best unifying explanation for these claims. I doubt even that, but even if it were the case, there are problems with all three.

It’s true that Rockwell painted a lot of boys. His career as an illustrator began when, at age 16, he became the art editor for Boy’s Life . He honed his skills and sensibilities throughout his late teens and early twenties painting for that magazine and other juvenile magazines, mostly catering to boys. It makes perfect sense that he’d develop a particular capacity for painting boys. People liked his paintings of kids. He sold a couple such paintings to the Saturday Evening Post as his first covers for them. His friends, especially his studio-mate and sort-of mentor Clyde Forsyth, urged him to stick with painting boys, since he was so good at it. (Rockwell himself felt these kid pictures were a bit of a bore, and wanted to do other things. He had to be pushed to stick with them.) Solomon adds that Rockwell painted the boys lovingly and well, while his paintings of girls were not nearly so good. (94) She doesn’t give any specific examples, and I am not sure I agree. But even if the point were true, it is fully explained in virtue of boys being his “thing.” Many painters have specialties. Rockwell’s own grandfather, as Solomon tells us, had a thing for painting birds. I doubt he was sexually attracted to them (at any rate, there’s no evidence he acted on his impulses to bestiality). He just found his niche painting them. So with the early Rockwell and boys.

Rockwell did indeed form friendships with many of his boy models, including young Billy Paine. (I’m going to follow the custom of spelling it this way: Solomon spells it Payne, and she’s probably correct to do so. It’s nice that she’s correct about something, and I’d like to leave her that victory.) Paine was a favorite model of Rockwell’s for a few years, but as he got older, Rockwell used him less. After all, Rockwell’s specialty was boys, not young men. Paine reacted to this with jealousy—beating up one of the boys who modeled for Rockwell later. This is intelligible without any insinuations that Paine had any sexual interest in Rockwell. More to the point, Paine’s jealousy is totally irrelevant to the question of Rockwell’s feelings. Rockwell’s friendships had a strong savor of business about them: He was interested in people who were connected in some way to art. Once Paine had outgrown his usefulness as a model, Rockwell had little interest in him, and the friendship ended.

Solomon’s belief that Rockwell’s painting contains sexually suggestive scenes is even harder to credit. Solomon focuses on two of Rockwell’s most famous scenes. (317-320) First, the picture of the runaway kid and the cop in the diner. ( Post cover for March 15, 1958.) Second, the picture of the boy in the doctor’s office, standing on a chair, lowering his pants as he prepares for a shot. ( Post cover for September 20, 1958.) Sexual? I don’t see it. These pictures are sexual only if everything is sexual. Admittedly, I’m only asserting that the paintings aren’t sexual, and that’s far from compelling. But, then Solomon only asserts that they are sexual. Our claims are on even footing. But, as I’ll demonstrate, Solomon has a habit of twisting Rockwell’s paintings to fit her agenda, and that kind of twisting is all there is to this pair of interpretations, too.

So Solomon’s evidence for Rockwell’s supposed pedophilic impulses adds up to naught. But there’s a larger problem with her case than that. She consistently leaves out facts that run contrary to her story. For example, Rockwell tells a story about two of his young models: Billy Paine, and Paine’s friend Eddie Carson. The boys, hanging around in Rockwell’s studio while he worked, would wait for a pedestrian to come past the open window, and then call out “Oh, Mr. Rockwell, don’t. Please. Oh, Mr. Rockwell, we didn’t know you were that kind of man.” The pedestrian, naturally, would stop and come back towards the open window, but the boys “always ruined their own game at this point by breaking into shouts of laughter.” To my mind, this story persuasively undermines the idea that Rockwell had pedophilic impulses. It strikes me as a near psychological impossibility that a pedophile (active or repressed) would tell this story on himself. It would hit too close to home. Maybe I’m wrong about that. If so, I’d be interested to hear alternative interpretations. We get no such thing from Solomon.

There are other such problems. I said above, for example, that Solomon’s case for Rockwell’s pedophilia rested in part on his strong relationships with his boy models. And I argued that this was hardly evidence for pedophilia. But there’s more that can be said. Rockwell had strong relationships with many of his models, only some of whom were boys. One of his most prolific models was James K. Van Brunt, an elderly man with an enormous mustache. Van Brunt’s fabulous face showed up in so many Rockwell illustrations for a time, that Rockwell was forbidden by the editor of the Post to use him anymore. Rockwell paid Van Brunt ten dollars to shave off his mustache, hence eliminating his most distinguishing feature, and allowing Rockwell to continue to employ him. Solomon doesn’t tell us this story. It doesn’t quite fit into the picture she wishes to paint.

Sometimes, I just don’t know what to make of things Solomon says. She seems to find it ironic that Rockwell, despite his long relationship with the Boy Scouts, never served as a scout leader (nor did his sons participate in scouting). This may be evidence of his inadequacies as a father, and Solomon takes pains to press that inadequacy. But imagine what a biographer intent on seeing pedophilic urges everywhere in Rockwell’s life would have made of it if Rockwell had been a Boy Scout leader! The proper way to see his failure to serve as a leader is that scouting has nothing to do with art, and as such wasn’t interesting to him. For Rockwell, it was all about the art.

More than once, Solomon describes paintings wrongly. I don’t mean that her interpretations are wrong (although, that too). I mean she describes the painting incorrectly. First, there is the wonderful picture of a serviceman returning home from the war. ( Post cover, May 26, 1945) He stands, back the viewer, in front of his old apartment, while his family and neighbors react with joy. There is a man on the roof over the door to the apartment, repairing the shingles. Solomon says this repairman is black. He’s not. This mistake is a mystery to me. I don’t know how she could have made it. In other cases, her false descriptions are easier to understand. They’re ideologically driven.

Consider, for example, one of Rockwell’s best-known paintings: Rosie the Riveter. ( Post cover, May 29, 1943) Solomon says that Rosie the Riveter’s eyes are closed. (224) They’re not. They’re looking down, and the lids are low, but they are very clearly open—she perfectly echoes the look of Michelangelo’s Isaiah, after which Rockwell modeled the painting.

If you stick with the book itself, this error, like the previous one, is inexplicable. But Solomon reveals the source of the error in an interview :

Q: In one painting, “Girl at Mirror,” you say the doll in the picture could be masturbating.
A: Did I say that? I took out so much, you cannot imagine. You know who else is masturbating? Rosie the Riveter. Women to him were like sexual demons. [She looks up the painting.] Over here, the riveting-gun penis on her lap, and in the background these pulsating red waves. Even though she’s a worker she’s not working, she’s just eating and satisfying her desires. But I thought it was too much—no one would agree with me—so I took just took it out.

Admittedly, I’m reading between the lines here, but the inference seems obvious enough: Solomon decides that Rosie is masturbating, and so imagines her in a pose redolent of sexual pleasure—think: Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa (interpreted as carnally as possible). Because of her sexualized take on the painting, her description of the painting goes wrong.

My third example of a wrongly-described painting will, finally, turn us towards the second of the two disturbing contentions about Rockwell that I began with—the contention that Rockwell’s self-absorption led to three deaths. There’s a lovely two-panel “before-and-after” painting of a family drive to and from the lake. ( Post cover, August 30, 1947) Mom, Dad, kids, and Grandma are crammed into the car. In the morning, they are brimming with energy, and in the evening they are slumped and exhausted. Solomon reports that unlike the others (all of whom have gone from perky to exhausted), evening Grandma is unchanged. But she’s not unchanged. Evening Grandma is quite different from morning Grandma. First, evening Grandma’s hands are out of the image, no longer visibly clenched in front of her like morning Grandma’s. Second, evening Grandma’s mouth has taken on a far more mellow and relaxed look. Morning Grandma’s deep frown is gone. Grandma has changed less dramatically than the members of the younger two generations in the car, but she has changed, and the change is easily visible. Morning Grandma has a clenched rigidity. Evening Grandma has lost that clenched look. She is better for her day.

I said this had relevance to the second accusation. And it does. Here is what Solomon takes away from the painting: “The joke, of course, is that there’s nothing more exhausting than a day off with your family. You leave home refreshed; you return home needing a break from your break.” (241) The idea here is that Rockwell doesn’t like to spend time with his family, does anything he can to avoid it, and prefers to be left alone with his work—and that this apparently cute image of family togetherness is really an expression of Rockwell’s utter lack of interest in his own family. Well, if the characters in the picture are meant to exemplify that theme, then Grandma at least is a singular failure. She is returning home much refreshed.

But why think about the exhaustion of the others in the car in the way that Solomon suggests? As she says, you might be exhausted after a long day with your family because you find your family tiresome . But, alternatively, you might be exhausted after a long day with your family because you find your family tiring . And that’s a very different thing. It’s easy to imagine the family in this picture spending an exhausting but delightful day at the lake, playing around in their little boat Skippy. As it happens, Rockwell’s second wife Mary wrote to her sister about a day spent with Norman, their two oldest children, and Rockwell’s artist friend Fred Hildebrandt: “You would have died if you could have seen us five in that little leaky boat with sides about three inches above the water! But I never had more fun.” (189) The overall tone of the picture in question is far more in accord with this latter interpretation. But Solomon can’t see that—and even more surprisingly, Solomon can’t see the evident fact that evening Grandma has changed for the better—because Solomon is so convinced that the picture must be attacking family life.

The theme of finding family tiresome is a large one for Solomon. She insists particularly on Rockwell’s utter neglect of his family, and in particular of his first two wives. By all accounts, Rockwell’s first marriage was not a good one. After his wife fell in love with another man, she went to Las Vegas and obtained the divorce on grounds of mental cruelty. Solomon writes “Irene charged that her husband was so absorbed in his work that he had barely looked at her in the fourteen years in which she had tried to share his life.” (141) Irene remarried, but her life remained sad.

Only four years after the divorce, on a Friday in November, Irene’s lifeless body was found in the bathtub by her husband. Her death certificate lists the cause as “accidental drowning.” In reality, it is nearly impossible for an adult to drown in the shallow water of a tub because of the strength of physical reflexes that alert you to danger. But the firing of reflexes can be blocked by various factors, such as the consumption of too much alcohol. In Irene’s case, it cannot be known whether drinking played a role; no autopsy was performed. (141-142)

Irene is the first casualty of Rockwell’s indifference in Solomon’s account. Mary is the second.

On her death certificate, the cause of death is listed as “coronary heart disease.” That was the official explanation that was furnished to the locals . . . Friends wondered whether she had taken her own life . . . At Rockwell’s request, no autopsy was performed; the quantity of drugs in her bloodstream at the end remains unknown. Suicide was not out of the question. In the past, she had taken at least two overdoses and been sent off to psychiatric hospitals. (330)

Solomon hammers repeatedly on the theme that Rockwell’s neglect is what drove Mary to this desperation. Rockwell indeed was a workaholic, famously going to his studio seven days a week. That this devotion to his work amounts to cruelty or neglect is a tremendous leap.

Take the very first example she offers of Rockwell’s neglect: He spent the evening of the day that he proposed to Mary at a Boy Scout event, rather than with her. But Rockwell was presenting Eagle Scout awards at an event which had obviously been arranged far ahead of time. He had a previous commitment, and it’s only reasonable to think that both Norman and Mary knew ahead of time that, due to this commitment, he wasn’t going to be sticking around for a cozy evening with his new fiancée. Solomon says that “Mary had a reason to feel slighted, but surely she held her tongue. She was good at putting on a cheerful front. She had been engaged for less than twelve hours and already he had to miss dinner and be somewhere else.” (146) But there’s no reason at all to think that Mary was such a petulant child as to feel slighted.

Another example. Early in their marriage, Mary and Norman moved to Paris. There, Rockwell struck up a friendship with the American artist Alan Haemer. Solomon says that Mary was “vexed by her husband’s attachment to yet another worshipful young friend who distracted him from his marriage.” (156) But there’s no evidence that Mary was vexed, or that Rockwell was distracted. (But hang onto this point for a while: it is connected to Solomon’s claim that Rockwell was a repressed homosexual, and that these “worshipful” friendships were homoerotic, in a repressed sort of way.) The actual evidence is entirely to the contrary. Solomon herself cites a letter Mary wrote: “It was ‘awfully nice,’ as she wrote, for him to have ‘some one near him, a man, and an artist with whom to talk things over.’” In short, Mary’s own testimony is that she was glad Norman had found a friend. How Solomon manages to deduce that she was vexed about this friendship is anyone’s guess. A great part of Solomon’s case for Rockwell’s supposed neglect of Mary rests on just such manipulations of the evidence as this.

Sometimes, it’s even worse. Solomon writes about a passage in Rockwell’s autobiography, where he says of Irene, “After we’d been married awhile, I realized that she didn’t love me.” Solomon comments: “He never seemed to flip the question and contemplate whether or not he loved her.” (82) In other words, he was so detached from Irene that it never even occurred to him to think about whether he loved her. Except that it did occur to him to think about it. And he said so within five lines of the passage she’s just quoted. “When I realized that she didn’t love me and, later on, that I didn’t love her, I didn’t say ‘let’s quit. ’I didn’t say much of anything. So the marriage lasted fourteen years.” Yes, like virtually anyone would, Rockwell tends to put the blame on Irene. ( She didn’t love me first !) But he does flip the question. Solomon hides this. No, she contradicts it.

For Solomon, even Rockwell’s kindness serves as evidence of his cruelty. Recall the passage about the divorce from Irene that I quoted above, with its dark reference to mental cruelty. Well, those were the grounds on which a collusive divorce like Rockwell’s would be granted. Rockwell didn’t contest those grounds, precisely because he knew that Irene wanted to be free of him so she could marry her lover. Had he contested the divorce, then obviously that would have been evidence of his self-absorption, too, since he would have been standing in the way of Irene’s new life. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I mentioned three deaths allegedly brought about through Rockwell’s self-absorption, and so far I’ve only gotten to two. The third is the death of Billy Paine—obviously a different kind of story than the deaths of Rockwell’s wives. Solomon suggests that Paine was driven to suicide by Rockwell’s throwing him over. “It is possible that Billy’s fall from the rooftop was not an accident, but a suicide. As the papers reported, nobody saw him fall.” (97) Well, it’s also possible that Rockwell threw Billy out the window. But it would be crazy to hint that he actually did. And as far as the evidence goes, it’s equally crazy to hint that Billy threw himself out. But despite the lack of evidence, Solomon wants to see something ugly and destructive in Rockwell’s relationship with Paine, so she manages to see it. Yet again, her seeing that ugliness prevents her from seeing Rockwell’s pictures properly.

Consider Rockwell’s illustration of Tom Sawyer creeping from his window for his midnight meeting with Huck Finn. The text that accompanies the image says “a single minute later he was dressed and out of the window and creeping along the roof of the ‘ell’ on all fours. He ‘meow’d’ with caution once or twice, as he went.” The picture shows Tom with one leg thrown out of the window and resting on a drainpipe. He has a hand to his mouth, which is wide open, obviously to ‘meow.’ Solomon writes, “Tom is transported to a suburban house with another house visible next door and, as he climbs out of the window, he pauses and cries out into the night.” (171) It’s evident that Solomon wants the picture to evoke Billy Paine. I don’t doubt that Rockwell thought of Billy Paine as he painted Tom coming out of the window—how could he not? But Solomon wants to draw more from the image than this evocation allows. She tells us that the image “departs dramatically” from Twain’s story. In other words, Rockwell forced the story to his own ends, because he was haunted by Billy Paine. But it’s false that the picture departs dramatically from the text.

To rebut just one of her suggested departures: Rockwell hasn’t moved the house to the suburbs to capture the location of Billy’s death. Aunt Sally’s house was not out in the country. It was in the middle of town, and would have had houses all around it. Rockwell has painted the town of St. Petersburg (or rather Hannibal) as he saw it when he visited. Indeed, he took pride in the fact that unlike previous illustrators of Twain, he had taken the time to go and visit the town so that he could be as authentic as possible. Solomon wants to find dramatic departure here, so that she can use it to suggest that Billy Paine’s death weighed heavily on Rockwell (due to the guilt, you know), and pushed him to falsify his illustration. But to be frank, her whole discussion of Billy Paine’s death and its effect on Rockwell is more than a little confusing. At one moment, Solomon is accusing Rockwell of being cold and non-responsive to Paine’s death. (97) At the next, she’s implying he’s terribly haunted by it. I think it’s more likely he was just plain saddened by it, as anyone would be. As is so often the case, Solomon ignores a story that has a direct bearing on this matter. In a 1928 interview, Rockwell and Eddie Carson (we met him earlier—a friend of Billy’s and another of Rockwell’s regular models) were telling a journalist about some of Rockwell’s working methods, and his relationships with his models.

Rockwell, joking good-naturedly with the boy about the trouble he and his friends too often stirred up, momentarily forgot where the topic would lead him. He began merrily to discuss Billy’s tendency to play tricks in the studio, finding himself stammering within seconds: “Billy Paine was the worst of all and—.” The interviewer explains that “both smiles faded. For some time neither [Rockwell nor Eddie] seemed able to speak. Then the artist recovered enough to continue talking.

What stands out in this story is that Rockwell recalled Billy with affection, and felt genuine sorrow over his death. Perhaps he became choked up because of deep guilt. But I doubt it. And at any rate, when a biographer wishes to present as robust a take on Rockwell’s relationship with Paine as Solomon does, I would think she’d feel compelled to deal with this story. But she doesn’t. However, she doesn’t completely ignore it. She mentions this interview. She simply strips from it any mention of Rockwell’s choking up. She doesn’t overlook the story—she leaves the crucial bit out of it. (100-101)

Elsewhere, Solomon talks about the earliest known painting of Rockwell’s: It’s a deathbed scene, with a minister kneeling by the bedside of a little child. The picture is an illustration of a poem by Oliver Goldsmith. On the image Rockwell includes the lines “But in his duty prompt at every call / He watched, he wept, he prayed and felt for all.” Rockwell painted this as a project in his illustration class, taught by Thomas Fogarty. For Fogarty’s fundamental rule of illustration is that the picture must be the servant of the text. Solomon says that this picture breaks Fogarty’s rule because the poem doesn’t mention any deathbed scene.

Now, as it happens, the poem does include a deathbed scene: “Beside the bed where parting life was layed / And sorrow, guilt, and pain, by turns, dismayed / The reverend champion stood. At his control / Despair and anguish fled the struggling soul / Comfort came down the trembling wretch to raise / And his last faltering accents whispered praise.” It seems likely that Rockwell, unlike Solomon, actually took the trouble to read the poem.

Now, ask yourself why Solomon has tried to argue that Rockwell has done something contrary to the instructions of his teacher. I think the answer is this: “Rockwell moved the scene indoors and chose to capture a moment of tenderness between an older man and a young man, even though no such scene is described in the poem.” (46) Once again we encounter the insinuation of pedophilic impulses in Rockwell, connected with errors about the art.

The distorting influence of Solomon’s agenda is easy to see in cases where it prompts her to simply describe the works wrongly. Sometimes, it manifests itself merely in the interpretations. Consider Solomon’s take on Rockwell’s painting of a puppeteer, which shows a marionette man and woman bowing to one another. ( Post cover for October 22, 1932.) We can “read” this painting, Solomon tells us, as an “allegory of an unhappy marriage, capturing a man and a woman who are forced to play roles and bow to social conventions that are not of their choosing.” (159) So this painting, Solomon hints, is evidence of Rockwell’s tortured sense of being trapped in a loveless marriage and forced by an uncaring and unaccepting world to deny his true self. This picture was produced only a couple of years into Rockwell’s second marriage, and there’s no reason at all to think that he was unhappy in it. But even if there were, the picture itself gives no license to Solomon’s interpretation. Or consider the Texan, a picture of Gary Cooper being made up for his role in his newest Western movie. ( Post cover for May 24, 1930.) The picture has a large cowboy hat in the foreground, in between the viewer and Gary Cooper. This hat serves as a “barricade in the foreground to keep you from touching. He [and here Solomon means Rockwell] cannot allow himself to touch what he wants.” (140) Possibly. Or, imagine that the hat is indeed supposed to serve as some kind of distancing device—perhaps it is in service of the real theme of the painting, which is the odd falsity of Hollywood: Gary Cooper is cut off from the viewer by the hat, because he’s behind the screen, in a land where cowboys wear lipstick. Or take the young sailor swept away by the new picture of his girlfriend. ( Post cover for January 18, 1919.) He sits with a buddy, staring off into space, clutching the photo. He is close to his buddy, though, and his unclutched hand seems to rest on the knee of his friend. This makes “you wonder why a young man who is supposedly thinking about his girlfriend is so comfortable sidling up to his hunky male friend.” (88) But it doesn’t make me wonder that.

These interpretations show that alongside her persistent interest in pedophilia, Solomon has a persistent interest in homosexuality. A great deal of Solomon’s putative discussion of Rockwell’s art consists in suggestions that Rockwell was homosexual. Perhaps he was. I take it that few people today would be deeply shocked by this suggestion. But as usual, her evidence for it disintegrates upon serious examination. Solomon argues, for example, that he had lots of male friends, and some of these relationships were fairly intense. And this is true. But, first, there is such a thing as friendship, and it can be intense without being sexualized. Second, Rockwell’s intense relationships with men were almost exclusively with men who were artists