A Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving

The excellent Norman Rockwell Museum delivers a holiday feast of art.

Y e olde Arlington, where I live in southwestern Vermont, has, for a town of fewer than 2,500 people, abundant claims to fame. Many of the Green Mountain Boys lived here. Arlington was for a time capital of the Vermont Republic, taking it international, though with a population then in the hundreds, it must have been the world’s smallest. Robert Frost knew Arlington well, coaxed to live in neighboring Shaftsbury by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Arlington’s culture queen, a Pulitzer-finalist writer, the pioneer in the Montessori method in America, and an assiduous networker. And then there’s Norman Rockwell (1894–1978).

Rockwell, his wife, Mary, and their three sons lived in Arlington from 1938 to 1953, when they moved to Stockbridge in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Stockbridge got the museum — the Norman Rockwell Museum, dedicated to American illustration and owning a trove of his work — but Rockwell’s most creative years and his best models were here. I visit the Stockbridge museum once or twice a year because its exhibitions are always top-notch, and this year’s Norman Rockwell: Home for the Holidays is a sentimental favorite. Rockwell’s many things, but I think his calling card is gratitude’s premier marketeer and image maker. In Home for the Holidays, Thanksgiving stars but also Christmas, family reunions, country life, and tried-and-true values. Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings from 1943, which led to illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post and millions of war bond drive posters, are always on display in the museum and still pack a punch.

Home for Thanksgiving was the Post’s cover image for its November 24, 1945, Thanksgiving issue. The models were, in fact, mother and son, Sarah Hagelberg, who owned a dairy farm in Arlington with her husband, the Rockwell family’s milkman, and Dick, who served in the 9th Army Air Corps, in which he flew 65 daytime bombing missions. Dick’s war is over and done. He’s happy to be in the warmth of his mother’s kitchen doing prosaic work rather than blowing Nazis to smithereens. Dick the model was only 26 in 1945. Rockwell aged him to show the toll war took but puts him in what could be a child’s chair in which the returning vet also seems happy.

My parents knew Dick and his wife, Tish, through square dancing groups in Bennington County, where they also met Rockwell, a square dancing impresario. They owned a farm in nearby Stamford in Vermont so, while based in Connecticut, we were in Vermont a lot. Comparing Home for Thanksgiving with Thanksgiving Ye Glutton, which graced the cover of Life magazine on November 22, 1923, is illuminating. Both were cover images, but Life was by far more irreverent than the Post, and 1923 and 1945 could not, as zeitgeists go, have been more different. Ye Glutton is packed with mock colonial-era props and flips a stereotype by showing a beanpole as a glutton. The lightheartedness of the Roaring Twenties meets the peak of the Colonial Revival movement.

For Ye Glutton and nearly all his art from the Teens into the Thirties, when he moved to Arlington, Rockwell used professional models. Once in Vermont, he used the locals — farmers, factory workers, the town barber, the town doctor, neighborhood kids — for authenticity, some worn by age and labor, many with plain, sweet Yankee faces, some ruddy and robust from the outdoors. Vermont’s not grim, but it’s no place for slapstick. Then, people lived simply. Few were materialists. Winters were, and still are, tough. It’s isolated, and the mountains surrounding Arlington make it seem more so.

Rockwell gradually sheds frippery. The narratives he suggests turn simpler and deeper. Home for Thanksgiving in 1945 could mean joy — restrained since it’s Vermont — in simple things like peeling potatoes or pathos since some never came home. Dorothy Fisher’s son, James, died months before the war ended, during the liberation of the Philippines. An Army doctor, he was killed by a mortar blast when treating soldiers wounded while freeing POWs from a Japanese-run prison camp. Fisher, nationally known as a novelist and public intellectual, lost her son. Sarah Hagelberg, a farmer’s wife whom no one knew beyond Arlington, got hers back.

Home for Thanksgiving hung for years in the hallway at the American Legion Post in Winchendon in rural north-central Massachusetts, thought to have been a gift from Rockwell to a Roman Catholic priest friend who gave it to the Legion Post sometime in the 1950s to decorate its new building. This is, in itself, instructive. For visitors to the Rockwell Museum and any other museum that owns one, Rockwell’s paintings are bold, monumental, and arresting. He was a very, very good artist. Though scorned by academic snoots as an illustrator for commercial — and bourgeois — magazines and for the Boy Scouts, he’s part of the long line of American genre artists, specializing in scenes of everyday life, that runs from William Sidney Mount to George Caleb Bingham, Eastman Johnson, Homer, the Ash Can artists, and even Hopper.

Rockwell’s paintings, though, weren’t the finished work of art. They were one step leading to the published illustration, often the cover image of a glossy magazine. Rockwell’s paintings would go to designers and printers — for the Post at the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia — and fashioned for both the far smaller scale of a magazine and mass production. The paintings, best seen as modellos, weren’t much valued until the 1980s. Rockwell gave some away to friends. His publisher kept many of them in storage. A few weeks ago, the Boy Scouts sold some to raise money for the organization’s child abuse settlements. For decades, the Legionnaires in ye olde Winchendon thought what hung in their hallway was a reproduction and nothing of value. They learned otherwise, to their shock and euphoria, when Heritage Auctions in Dallas sold it at its November 5, 2021, American art sale for $4.3 million. I suspect they served champagne and caviar along with their Thanksgiving turkey. And heaps of mashed potatoes.

Home for the Holidays does Thanksgiving but also Christmas and New Year’s. It’s very fun and beautifully presented. Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, Christmas carolers, Santa, and the aftermath of a New Year’s Eve party are there. So is The Discovery from 1956 in which a boy, shown aghast, discovers a Santa costume in his father’s dresser.

Rockwell moved to Vermont to give his young sons a rural setting for clean, often crisp country air and for country values like love of the outdoors, neighborliness, and Vermonters’ well-known scorn for pretension. He’d lived in New York City and New Rochelle and tired of phony people and social climbers. Arlington wasn’t too far from the train station in Albany. The area had already attracted a group of illustrators, among them Mead Schaeffer, who’d eventually produce 46 Saturday Evening Post covers. By the late Thirties, Rockwell was a star illustrator and seen as his day’s Charles Dana Gibson or James Montgomery Flagg. He bought a sprawling old farmhouse and land in West Arlington, steps from the old Methodist church, a covered bridge, and the Battenkill River, still one of the best spots in the Northeast for trout fishing. His neighbors owned a dairy farm. He loved it and planned to spend the rest of his life there but, in the early Fifties, he and his wife empty nesters, Mary in particular found so rural a setting too isolated. So, they moved to Stockbridge, about 70 miles south, still in the country but a summer resort spot for rich New Yorkers since the 19th century.

Steps from Home for the Holidays are Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings. The federal government commissioned the scenes to visualize President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms that were the core of his 1941 State of the Union address and the Atlantic Charter. Freedom of speech and worship and freedom from want and fear were, for FDR, essential human rights to be universally protected. Rockwell was charged with developing images to enliven the four themes and found “freedom from want” the easiest. It has to be the essential Thanksgiving scene as well as a view of family values and, to sourpusses today, a celebration of patriarchy, but who cares about them?

By the Forties, Rockwell wasn’t painting before live models but, rather, used photographs and, no, he didn’t photograph an actual Thanksgiving dinner, though a roasted turkey hoisted by a woman who was indeed his family’s cook did indeed figure. Rockwell said years later that this was the only time he ate a model. He felt that the spontaneity he wanted, especially smiles and laughter, were too taxing for models to hold so he got them through photos and composed from there. He’s already choreographed a scene so knew, more or less, the poses he wanted.

The cast of Freedom from Want included some of his favorites. Jim Martin, who was a carpenter in Arlington, looks at us invitingly from the lower right-hand corner. He was a favorite Rockwell model and the only model to appear in all the Four Freedoms pictures. Rockwell called him “the old philosopher” in his autobiography for his unusual combination of gravity and friendliness. I knew Shirley Hoisington, the little girl peeking from behind the head of her brother, Bill. She was a teacher for years and then worked at our local chocolate shop. She died about ten years ago. Her brother was a real estate broker in nearby Bennington and died at 47 in the early Seventies. The woman holding the turkey was the Rockwell family cook. Her husband, Thaddeus, modeled for the standing man. Rockwell’s mother modeled for the white-haired woman whose profile we see on the right. Mary Rockwell’s opposite her, smiling. Florence Lindsey is the smiling, fetching young woman on the right. I met her daughters a few years ago at a Rockwell models reunion while I was working on an essay on the Freedom of Speech picture. Rockwell’s child models, by the by, are still with us in surprising numbers, owing in part to our cold weather, which tends to refrigerate all things and defer decay.

Is it sappy? Does it have the makings of a Hallmark card? Most of my academic chums think Rockwell’s work is fake and sentimental at best, science fiction at worst, but most live on a diet of angst and estrangement and, of course, few live in rural settings. Rockwell doesn’t do obscurity. He doesn’t do cryptic or crazy, either. That said, isn’t Thanksgiving a time when we at least try to put black, disabling moods aside?

Rockwell thought the scene was a flop overseas. “The Europeans sort of resented it because it wasn’t freedom from want,” Rockwell wrote in his autobiography, “it was overabundance, the table was so loaded with food.” But Europeans weren’t the target audience and, in any event, Arlington was a farm town where most food was what we’d call locally sourced. And how packed with food is this scene, exactly? Yes, the turkey’s a whopper and impossibly carried by the old lady — the laws of gravity forbid it — but aside from celery, some fruit, a plate of pickles, cranberry sauce, and a covered dish holding stuffing or mashed potatoes, it’s hardly the tasting menu at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Water’s served. Rockwell pushed himself in experimenting with a white-on-white palette and a complicated still life packed with geometric shapes and reflections. Light glowing from the window invests the scene with a touch of spirituality, and green floral wallpaper puts fertility in the mix.

In 1943, the Post commissioned four writers to compose a short essay accompanying each Rockwell Freedom scene. Booth Tarkington, the author of The Magnificent Ambersons, Penrod, and Alice Adams, wrote a story for Freedom of Speech; the poet Steven Vincent Benet gave Freedom from Fear context; and the historian Will Durant addressed Freedom of Worship. All were famous then, but Carlos Bulosan (1913–1956) was an outlier, a little-known poet, born in the Philippines, an immigrant, a labor organizer, and a socialist. The Post might have been middlebrow but it was also a catholic publication and catered to those in the Big Tent. During the war, after ten years of the New Deal, this included socialists.

“The totalitarian nations hate democracy,” he wrote. “They hate us because we ask for a definite guarantee of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom from fear and want.” But Americans can never be free “unless we use what we produce,” but so long as people are denied the fruits of their labor, “so long will want manifest itself in a world of slaves.” With plenty to eat, he believes, we’re healthy enough to enjoy what we eat, to read, think, and debate, to be creative, and to embrace democracy as partners and players.

Bulosan’s Post essay launched him. Some critics compared his 1946 autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart to The Grapes of Wrath and a unique take on the plight of Filipinos in California. I haven’t read it but, judging from his Post piece, he’s a spartan, bracing, graphic writer. It’s likely he was a utopian but, unlike today’s socialists, doesn’t hate the country. He wasn’t a nihilist, either. He was aspirational, fighting the good fight, and living like a monk. He did blather about “each according to his abilities, each according to his needs” and was at the very least a crypto-communist, but I’ve seen worse. He died in poverty and was forgotten until his work and example were revived starting in the 1970s by keepers of the flame of Filipino-American heritage.

When Rockwell read Bulosan’s draft essay, he offered to jettison Freedom from Want and start from scratch. The two, he felt, weren’t aligned. One was about lack, the other about plenty. His editor convinced him that a general thematic unity was good enough and, by the way, the government was thinking of banning four-color printing to save the oil from ink. Better to go forward than lose time and be forced to go halftone.

So, on this Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for too many things to detail, but I treasure my proximity to so much good art in so rural a place. The Bennington Museum, interpreting the art and history of Vermont, is a few miles down the road as is the Clark Art Institute with its princely collection of Renoirs, Homers, and Sargents. Williams College’s art museum is nearby, too, sadly closed as it is for a new museum building it really doesn’t need. Mass MoCA, the world’s biggest contemporary art museum, is in North Adams. Rockwell’s museum is farther south. I can’t call this an embarrassment of riches but a cherished blessing.