Norman Rockwell, from New Rochelle to Vermont to the Hereafter

His work is an ode to the people of the Green Mountain State and the granite in them thar hills.

L ast week I wrote a bit about Vermont’s Covered Bridge Week, celebrating our hundred or so quaint but practical mid-19th century covered bridges of which there are two in ye olde Arlington, where I live. I write about the arts in Vermont two or three times a year — please indulge my prerogative as the art critic — so on to Norman Rockwell: At Home in Vermont, an engaging and revelatory exhibition at Shelburne Museum. It’ll bring joy, and then there’s a big surprise.

Rockwell and his family lived in Arlington in southwestern Vermont from 1938 to 1953. On view front and center at the start of the show is a portrait of Rockwell from 1950 by fellow Arlington artist Gene Pelham. It shows him relaxed and contemplative, brushed in hand, wearing a denim shirt, and looking very much an Everyman and reedy and taut enough to be a Vermonter. He’d been steeping in Vermont camaraderie and quietude for a decade already, nationally renowned for his Four Freedoms scenes and with hundreds of Post covers to his credit.

For nearly all his Vermont work, he’d used Arlington models, real locals, farmers, factory workers, kids, weathered old men and women, people who’d pared frills and follies from life. “Be yourself, come dressed in your everyday,” he told them. His standard fee was $5, which, during the Depression and the war, was not chump change. He’d learned to pare his scenes, too, to things in life that really mattered.

What about Vermont drew this native New Yorker, born and bred on the Upper West Side, and by the ’30s established and comfortable with a home and studio in New Rochelle? At Home in Vermont really starts with a discreetly effective mover and shaker: Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879–1958). These days, she’s unknown beyond the Green Mountains, but she was once famous. She lived in Arlington and was a champion in attracting city slickers like Rockwell to our tiny, easy-on-the-nerves towns set among mountains, woods, and lots of green, except for red in the fall, white in winter, and brown in mud season. In the early ’20s, she attracted Robert Frost to Shaftsbury, just south of Arlington. He didn’t venture too far. He’s buried in next door Bennington.

“When you tell people in New York you live in Vermont,” Fisher wrote in 1937, “they say ‘Oh, how I envy you,’ and they mean it.” The psychological and moral stress of the Depression, in its seventh year, disabused people of the attractions of bright lights, big cities, and modern hustle and bustle. Vermont, set in a simpler, kinder past, seemed the antidote and that rare vessel where our better selves repose. Rural northern New England was in. No surprise then that, around the same time, Grandma Moses appeared as well as Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

Fisher was a woman of letters whose novel The Brimming Cup went mano a mano a mano with Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street for the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. She wrote a dozen children’s books, too. She’d learned about the Montessori teaching method while traveling in France and Italy and was the key to bringing it to the United States.

Fisher also served on the four-member selection committee for the Book of the Month Club from its founding in 1925 to 1951. As a board member, she not only influenced the taste of millions of mostly middle-class readers but put some high-octane titles on the launchpad. Of Mice and Men, Mutiny on the Bounty, Animal Farm, Gone with the Wind, and her last hurrah, Catcher in the Rye, were but a few.

“What we call ‘Vermontism’ is really old-fashioned Americanism,” Fisher said. Thrift, self-sufficiency, neighborliness, love of the outdoors, “not so beaten upon by as communities elsewhere by the storms of modern life.” In 1937, Norman and his wife, Mary, living in New Rochelle, wanted wide open spaces and country values in raising their three young sons. Norman was sick of suburban phonies and social climbers. Cachet helped. They knew Fisher lived in Arlington. They came, they saw, they bought — a house and studio in the quiet town of 1,300 people. Key Green Mountain Boys like Ira and Ethan Allen and Remember Baker had been locals, and, in the 1780s, Arlington was the capital of the Vermont Republic. Nothing much had happened in Arlington since then.

Rockwell was only one of a community of the prominent illustrators settling in Arlington in the late ’30s. Pelham, Mead Schaeffer, Don Trachte, John Atherton, and George Hughes are mostly unknown today but were very good artists who deserve a cheer. Some of their work is on view. Their magazine work tended to be upbeat, even cheery. Personally, though, each had a vision. Atherton’s paintings trend toward dark and surreal; Pelham’s are quiet and pastoral.

Pelham is the most consequential of Rockwell’s colleagues since he worked for Rockwell as his photographer. In New Rochelle, Rockwell used professional models, and his figures look like actors playing a part. His Santas, for instance — and he did a lot of them — look like high-end department store Santas. You know they’re fake. In Arlington he hired locals but felt he’d get the most from them by using photographs he posed and Pelham shot.

Among the exhibition’s delights is a suite of Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers from his Vermont era. They’re fantastic and revelatory to me since I thought I knew a lot about Rockwell. I’d never seen his covers for issues closest to April Fool’s Day. They’re his brand of Surrealism, with dogs with cat tails, mirrors reflecting things that couldn’t possibly be there, dolls in a doll shop looking exactly like young shoppers, and portrait subjects leaning out of their frames.

Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter was the May 29, 1943, cover. She’d likely have been called a big-boned girl. Rockwell used Michelangelo’s Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel ceiling as a model. Holding her rivet in one hand, a sandwich in another, she sits majestically even on her lunch break. A working girl needs to keep her strength up. Under her foot, already stomped, is Hitler’s Mein Kampf. She’s 100 percent invested in the cause, 24/7. Mary Doyle was the model. She was 19, a redhead, and it’s her face — but at only 110 pounds, her face and hair were about it. Her mother was Arlington’s switchboard operator, so knew all and sundry.

At the end of At Home in Vermont isn’t more Arlington or more civic icons but the premiere of three Rockwell paintings Shelburne recently got as a gift from Polychor, Inc., the world’s leading natural stone quarrier, and the Rock of Ages Corporation in Barre in Vermont. Barre (pronounced as in Goldwater) is what we call the Granite Capital of America, a stretch, I know, but indulge us. Some of us like to change the subject from the gruesome Bernie Sanders.

Vermont is an extraction state — extraction of granite, marble, slate, and milk from countless udders. No oil, alas, but architecture’s art and good art starts with materials. And commercial granite quarrying’s been the thing in Barre since 1810. Rock of Ages, now part of Polychor, was among Barre’s top producers of stone and of monuments. Kneeling Girl from 1955 and The Craftsman from 1963 and its preliminary oil sketch are the gifts. I didn’t know Rockwell had done these. Rock of Ages had hired him to create images for ad campaigns. The paintings, like nearly all Rockwell paintings, were intermediary steps leading to brochure and magazine ads. They stayed with the company.

People don’t die in Rockwell’s art — though geezers are aplenty — but we’ve got in Kneeling Girl at least one corpse fully planted and marked in serenely grey granite and, in The Craftsman, another in process. In one we see a young girl, in pigtails, jeans, and a pink blouse — very country and very ’50s — kneeling on cool, green grass, her yellow daisies delivered, school books by her side. She’s a Baby Boomer, when they were young and sweet.

Who’s dead, or, better still, who’s now got a prop for pushing up daisies? Rockwell’s not above a cheeky touch. Likely a grandparent. Flanking the Newton stone are anonymous stones in older styles, the one on the left from the 18th century, the one on the right an arch, popular from the 1810s into the 1850s. Generations come and gone, “As you are now, so once was I. . . . As I am now so you will be,” as old 18th-century New England markers often read.

Newton’s marker is sleek and modern, with a touch of a Pontiac’s zoom but also with a Victorian bouquet of roses — a pump on the brakes. The scene’s quiet save for a breeze rustling the branches touching the stone. Here, nature — and granite — get the last word. The scene is frank but not morbid. The books show us the girl likes to learn. She respects learning and respects the dead. She learns, theoretically at least, that death is part of life. And she knows for sure that so is memory.

The Craftsman is from 1963 and very different. The central figure in Kneeling Girl is young and innocent, a supplicant; but here we have an old man at work, the work death and mourners demand, and what work. For dead Norwell, his gravestone is his — or her — last brush with a lifetime of consumption. The craftsman designing and engraving the recipient’s gravestone, is, with the undertaker and gravedigger, the last in a long line of caregivers — starting with the doctor who delivered him and the mother who gave birth to him. There’s our world in the form of the worker, the business of life, and then the Next World — the very Victorian angel — rising above him, the gravestone, a surrogate for the corpse, in the middle.

By then, Rockwell had been gone from Vermont for ten years. He and his wife, empty nesters, moved to Stockbridge in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Norman would have stayed in Vermont, but his wife, Mary, found it too isolating. It certainly can be that.

Granite is found all over the world — the Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse sculptures, reviewed in July, are granite — but Vermont’s stone is renowned for its consistent color, uniformly fine grain, and even texture, and the purity of the Ivory soap, 99 44/100 percent pure variety. It’s found in a steady, medium gray, brilliant white, and charcoal grey flirting with black. Quartz gives granite its durability, feldspar its color, and mica its sparkle in the light.

Vermont granite is in buildings all over the country, among them the Woolworth Building, Union Station in Washington, D.C., various state capitals, and, who knows, possibly owing to its purity, Church of Latter Day Saints temples. Granite is not only for exteriors, gravestones, and sculpture. Barre’s local manufacturers make countertops, architectural details, outdoor seating, steps, and curbs.

Barre is home to the Vermont Granite Museum — housed in an old granite products manufacturing plant. Through 5,000 objects and archives galore, we’re taken from the raw stone in Vermont’s hills, millions of years in the making, to quarrying, making and crafting, marketing, and the landmarks we know. There’s a yearly Granite Festival at the museum — this year on September 19. Granite comes from the Latin word for grain, food for the belly, but granite is food for the mind. The stone evokes stability, permanence, and authority. In between fun and food at the Granite Festival, Vermonters and, we hope, tourists reflect on this wonder of nature.

Hope Cemetery in Barre is an open-air granite museum and a landscape of Vermont humor. Vermonters aren’t especially religious. As a cohort, the state’s said to be the least churched in America. At least in Manhattan and Washington they pretend.

I’m told that about half the stones were designed or carved by men in the business, for themselves and their families. Yes, there’s the Pieta. There’s even a version of the angel from The Craftsman. In one, a worried wife holds her dying husband. It’s Louis Brusa’s monument. He was a stone carver who died of silicosis from granite dust. He’d fought for better ventilation in granite sheds and won, but too late for him. He carved his stone himself, knowing he was near death’s door.

It’s typical of Vermonters to invest even in eternity a bit of black humor, like an angel in an uncelestial pose, legs crossed, her trumpet akimbo. She looks stoned. There’s a gravestone in the shape of a basketball, epitaph: “There’s No Room for Second Place . . . Only First Place Matters,” and one in the shape of a vintage airplane. My favorite is a mammoth old stock car owned by a locally famous racer killed in a snowmobile accident in 1991. “61” was his race car’s number. It’s no granite toy car. It’s nearly life size and tops his grave. He went to Heaven vroom, vroom. Welcome to Vermont.