Norman Rockwell by Laura Claridge Read Free Book Online Page B

books, and tales told in church by missionaries—the otherwise pious daughter of the even more religious Anne Elizabeth Hill would encourage in her own children an openness to excitement, reserving her highest praise for accomplishments that marked her sons as intrepid men of the world, like her brother and her father before them. She could be an invalid; they would be the outlet for her needs that went otherwise unaddressed.
    Whatever emotions were stirred by her masculine but gentle brother’s death, Nancy Hill registered its impact most tellingly by becoming engaged, the year Tom died, to a man who bore a striking physical resemblance to him. And she implied the values she held dear in a man through her choice of a husband whose character contrasted completely with the frivolous father she was said to detest.
    In later years, though her sisters granted more weight to Howard Hill’s charm than to the chaos he created, Nancy could only repeat darkly that he was a “street angel and a house devil.” If his name emerged in family conversation, she railed against his drunkenness. Nancy’s great-niece, Mary Amy Orpen, admits that “enough people in the room always agreed with her assessment that I guess she must have been on target.” Norman Rockwell assumed instead that Nancy’s demanding personality led her to judge her father too harshly. Typical of a tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to characters whose peccadilloes struck him as harmless, Rockwell emphasized in his family accounts that he’d heard that Howard Hill wasn’t really so bad. He tended to discount his mother’s opinions as self-interested anyway, and so thought Nancy was probably being typically unfair in her condemnation. In truth, the public conviction that poverty bred consumption led to the Hill family’s deep sense of humiliation at being silently stigmatized as consumptives, and Nancy Hill associated her father’s failure to earn a decent living with the shame-filled death her closest relatives had endured.
    She was proud, however, of the artistic lineage she felt she had inherited, and that she exhibited primarily through the elaborate embroidery designs she created for her family and for church functions. And she enjoyed sharing with her own children the childhood anecdote about Howard Hill lining up his eight or nine (depending on who was at home) progeny along a stair-rail or kitchen table, where he then passed a painting in progress along their paths, each girl or boy tasked with a particular assignment: one might have been taught to paint a certain kind of stump, one to shade leaves. Nancy was asked to perfect the moon as her contribution to such “potboilers,” as Norman later called them. Hardly the first artist to use his children to fill in the less important moments on his canvas, Hill nonetheless ingeniously engineered an aesthetic production line.
    On March 7, 1888, at age sixty-five, Howard Hill, having outlived his wife by two years, died of what the newspapers called an “epileptic fit” at the Yonkers boardinghouse where the widower lodged. Medical examiners called it heart failure. Whether the convulsion was brought on by a high fever from the tuberculosis he may well have shared with his son and wife was not noted; St. Paul’s registry of funerals also records Hill’s cause of death as heart failure, though the church sometimes substituted that vague phrase for less attractive possibilities. Given the contrast between the registry’s multitude of references to his wife’s and children’s attendance at church functions and the complete absence of any mention of Howard Hill, Hill’s funeral might well have been the only time the painter made it to church. In his obituary, the local paper declared him “an artistic painter by profession, [whose] abilities brought him considerable reputation.” Over one hundred years later, Hill’s paintings infrequently would show up for auction at Sotheby’s and