“There is no line between fine art and illustration; there is no high or low art; there is only art and it comes in many forms.”
— James Gurney, artist (1958- )
A history of narrative art, illuminated by lightning strikes of brilliance by 20th-century artists Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish and N.C. Wyeth, is on display at Stockbridge’s Norman Rockwell Museum.
While viewing the “Keepers of the Flame: Parrish, Wyeth, Rockwell and the Narrative Tradition” exhibit, which is on display through Oct. 28, you’ll see paintings by the three artists’ instructors and their forebears, and may be intrigued to discover that the roots of their education can be traced back to such classical 15th-century heavy hitters as Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci.
The exhibit’s curator Dennis Nolan, a professor of art at the Hartford Art School, undertook this deep, scholarly study following an epiphany some nine years ago. While teaching a watercolor course at the museum, he traced the links of Rockwell’s teachers “and their teachers and their teachers’ teachers.”
“I started thinking about how artists actually fit into history,” he told an opening night audience. “As I was investigating it, it didn’t stop. … There was this absolute unbroken line.”
Nolan is also the author of the show’s elegant companion catalogue by the same name. He focused upon this troika of artists as they were the major illustrators of their time.
Considering the more than 85 canvases composing the exhibit, one of which dates to the early 1400s, Nolan said “The great artists of the Renaissance are the great, grand teachers of all the folks here.”
Attempts to trace the threads of art teachers and their students beyond that point, he said, were tenuous.
“Bubonic plague had a lot to do with that,” he said. Indeed, the second pandemic, beginning in the mid-14th century, is estimated to have reduced Earth’s human population by one-third.
As a guide to this artistic heritage, Nolan has drawn a tree with numerous branches, each bearing the name of painters and illustrators. They ascend to Wyeth and Parrish, among the best-known creators of illustration’s “Golden Age,” as well as Rockwell, who arrived as that period was vanishing.
The exhibit features a large, touch-tone screen displaying dozens of these artists and their biographies in what was once a profession almost entirely dominated by men.
The curator paused alongside the large Rockwell painting “The Lineman,” a 1948 advertisement created for AT&T. The trees in the piece show the setting is late fall and the worker, intent on his job, wears a simple wool cap and checkered wool coat. It’s the era when linemen attached spikes to their boots, and while harnessed, climbed telephone poles. The image is virtually photographic.
“This really straightforward painting of a lineman, he didn’t just knock it off and get his thousand bucks,” Nolan said. “He spent just as much time on all that business as on the ‘Saturday Evening Post.’”
Rockwell is doubtlessly best remembered for creating more than 300 cover paintings for the late, great magazine. Those images, which date to the time of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, are on display in the museum’s Stockbridge Room.
The curator noted that, at age 15, the illustrator first studied at the National Academy of Design. His teacher’s teacher had been Edwin White, who’d been classically trained in Paris.
This early schooling taught Rockwell to dive deep into research to the point of obsession. Years later, before painting the exploits of “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” Rockwell traveled to Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Mo. He immersed himself in the culture, compulsively sketched and even bought well-worn clothes from the locals to provide authenticity for his paintings.
At age 17, Rockwell attended The Arts Students League where he received training from Francis Jones, a high society muralist who’d also been educated at the state-sponsored Ecole des Beaux Arts.
“The French academicians were masters at rendering the human figure,” Nolan said. That discipline crossed the ocean.
He explained that, in earlier times, the classically-trained European artists received commissions from the church, the state and wealthy patrons. Those American artists who’d trained abroad and returned here used their talents instead for commerce.
“What you see is the same training going through the French academies to America, but you see the clientele is changing,” Nolan said.
Among these artists, one of the longest shadows cast was by Howard Pyle (1853- 1911) who’s referred to as “the father of illustration.” He had been a black-and-white magazine illustrator and was in middle age when the four-color Heidelberg press was invented. This was a revolutionary breakthrough in publishing and several of Pyle’s early experiments testing color reproduction are on display.
Pyle was the first American to organize and teach at his own school of illustration in Delaware. Parrish and Wyeth were among his students. Pyle was hugely influential and told his students to put their heart into their work.
“Feel the wind and the rain on your skin. When you paint it, make your pictures live!” he once said.
Wyeth was an adventurous outdoorsman and in his youth he went west, rode with cowboys, lived with the Native Americans on their reservations and frequently slept under the stars. While still a student, he sold a cover to the “Saturday Evening Post.” His first commission was to illustrate the novel “Treasure Island” for Charles Scribner’s Sons. Some 26 more boys’ adventure novels followed, most of which are still in print.
Wyeth painted in broad strokes and could complete a 20-square-foot canvas in one day with no use of models.
“Wyeth is using what looks like a 3-inch house painting brush,” Nolan said. “It’s very bold and looks almost unfinished. You can see canvas through it.”
Yet his images are arresting and even chilling. Extraneous details are sometimes left vague, however, there’s a concentration on a character’s hands and face, lighting and mood.
“Wyeth is important because of the impact he had on the illustrated novel,” Nolan said. “He sort of set a lot of our thinking about characters in classic literature … and he had a tremendous impact on the artists who followed him.”
Although he shared some of the same artistic training as Wyeth, a trait Parrish shared with Rockwell was reliance upon photography for detailing his images. Both also used a magnifying device, the Balopticon, to project photos onto their canvases. What appear to be vast mountain ranges in Parrish’s paintings are no more than magnifications of rocks the artist found on his Cornish, N.H., estate.
Parrish probably surpassed Rockwell in compulsiveness. He designed and built sets as well as the clothing his models would wear. To create the glasslike finishes for his paintings, he would build up several thin coats of paint and varnish, bleach them in the sunlight and then repeat the process.
The artist made use of the “golden rectangle.” It’s assumed to be the most pleasing ratio of length to height, an example being the Parthenon in Greece. Parrish also worked out a complex geometry for placing objects and models. His unfinished paintings reveal a mathematical spider work of intersecting lines.
“Parrish is inventing this dream world of the imagination,” Nolan said. “The colors are dreamy. They’re not real.”
An art critic wrote that the artist created “the calm of the dream world” and often depicted “the precious spontaneity of youth.”
Parrish continued to paint until age 91 when he developed arthritis, and died at 95. Rockwell, in failing health with emphysema, died at 84. At age 62, Wyeth was killed, along with his grandson, in a car accident when the artist attempted to outrace a freight train at a crossing.
“Keepers of the Flame” continues at the Norman Rockwell Museum through Oct. 28. The museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $20 for adults, $10 for students with ID, and free for ages 18 and under.
Don Stewart is a freelance writer who lives in Plainfield. He has written for the Greenfield Recorder since 1994.