The Lesson of a New Exhibit About Artists at the Norman Rockwell Museum?

There is a hidden history in the story of art in America. The great artists did not start out as great artists. They were trained to be good by other painters and they did artistic work wherever they could find it to improve their art and make enough money to pay the bills.

That story is told in Keepers of the Flame: Parrish, Wyeth, Rockwell and the Narrative Tradition, a new exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, that just opened. The exhibit tracks the careers of three famous American artists, Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish and N.C. Wyeth and explores how they constructed their careers and how they were influenced by not only their teachers, but the work of artists going back seven hundred years. It’s a fascinating look at the lives artists lived, a behind the scenes peek at the brushes, canvasses and bowls of paint, whether in the darkest, coldest winter night or warmest balmy summer afternoon.

I did not visit the museum on a balmy summer afternoon, but a rain-soaked one. Rain came down in sheets as I held on to my umbrella and trudged through the drenched parking lot to the exhibit. I was quite a sight. Those three artists should have painted me fighting my way through the storm.

The exhibit stresses the lengthy history of artists teaching other artists and traces long lines of European artists, especially, who influenced Americans. You can see the paintings of artists from prior centuries, such as Lemuel Wilmarth, Henri Lehmann, Gustave Boulanger, Carle Van Loo and Lorenzo di Bicci, and then look at the works of Rockwell, Wyeth and Parrish and see how the newer artists borrowed a lot of style from those of the past. What’s that old saying, “there’s nothing new under the sun”? Well there’s nothing new on the canvas, either.

There were several European artists working in the early 1800s, as an example, who specialized in fantasy art, with gauzy landscapes and exotic characters who look like they came right out of the television series Game of Thrones. You look at them and look at a work by Parrish and you can see the similarities Now, Parrish, of course, did original work, but the theme of it, and general look, was that of the fantasy artists of long ago. The same could be said for Wyeth and Rockwell. The paintings next to their work, by artists from earlier centuries, does look similar. The modern artists added new characters and told new stories, though, and created their own distinctive look.

A second part of the exhibit is the story of how the trio of artisans, like so many others, started off drawing ads for magazines and illustrating short stories, poems for commercial magazines and books. Wyeth, as an example, started off in the early 1900s doing rich, lustrous illustrations for Robert louis Stevenson’s classic tale of pirates and the sea, Treasure Island and then continued with illustrations for over a dozen books in twenty years, including Robin Hood, Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe and The Last of the Mohicans. He also did illustrations for numerous bestselling-magazines, such Scribner’s. Rockwell followed a similar path, sketching ads for General Motors and illustrations for magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion and Boy’s Life. Parrish did the same.

Each of the three painters whose works are displayed in the exhibit had an interesting, and different, background. Parrish came from a wealthy family that took him to Europe on a vacation of several years in duration. When he came back he moved to Plainfield, New Hampshire, and put his art studio on the second floor of a building that housed his machine shop on the first. He was smart enough to capitalize on the print boom in the 1920s and mass produced his work so that hundreds of thousands of middle class Americans could purchase them. N.C. Wyeth left the East Coast as a young man and moved to the Southwest seeking to build up a background on life in that area for paintings. To do it, he worked as a cowboy, riding broncos, herding cows and tilling farmland. Rockwell went to several schools of art as a teenager and began selling works early. When he was just 17, he was named the art director of Boy’s Life magazine.

“The interesting thing is that these artists did not rush through these 'commercial' and magazine sketches at all. They devoted the same time and intensity to them as they did for a major piece of art. The result is that the ads and magazine illustrations are superb pieces of work in themselves,” said a Rockwell Museum official.

The three artists in the exhibit were in their prime just after the four-color printing press was introduced, giving American magazines the opportunity, from 1915 or so onward, to feature gorgeous colored illustrations. Their editors needed good artists, and right away, and they had Parrish, Wyeth and Rockwell.

The three men all acknowledge the influence on their work by past artists. “I guess an artist’s just stores up in his mind what he learns from looking at the work of other artists. And after a while, all the different things he has learned become mixed with each other and with his own ideas and abilities to form his technique, his way of painting,” said Rockwell.

Museum officials emphasize that all artists did that for hundreds of years and that one generation of artists served as teachers to the next.

“Every artist-teacher passes on to their pupils a certain way of seeing and drawing the world, creating a distinctive lineage. This ground-breaking exhibition traces the traditions of European painting that crossed the ocean to tutor America’s most famous illustrators, linking centuries past with the present while unveiling the alchemy of artists and their teachers,” said Rockwell Museum director Laurie Norton Moffat.

Wyeth agreed. “All the natural talents of youth cannot take the place of disciplined training,” he said, acknowledging his mentor, Howard Pyle.

Parrish used the works of old masters to create his stories. He said that he used paintings to create his own “world of make believe.”

The stories these particular artists tell are well known parts of American history. Rockwell created the small-town America that we all love with his very personal paintings. Parrish, who was extraordinarily popular in the 1920s, created fantasy worlds. Wyeth, the father of artist Andrew Wyeth, carved out a rich legacy of historical work, especially his paintings of the west, such as “The Bear Hunter” in 1909 and a series of lush paintings of Native Americans he did to illustrated stories in Scribner’s magazines and books.

The exhibit is nicely mounted. Works of the 14th to 19th centuries are housed in one gallery and then the works of the three contemporary American artists are housed in several neighboring galleries. The large paintings are kept separate from the small ones and the museum is well lighted. Numerous storyboards describe each painting. Several famous paintings by Rockwell, such as “Shuffleton’s Barbershop” and “Girl at the Mirror” are included.

The exhibit tells the story of Europe long ago and is a vivid window on American life from the middle of the 19th century to today. The trio of artists created gritty real life scenes (Wyeth), fantasy worlds (Parrish) and wonderful, warm life of small town America (Rockwell). A day at the Rockwell Museum is nice trip down the rabbit hole of history.

The Rockwell Museum is located on a 36-acre park just outside of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It is open year-round. The Keepers of the Flame exhibit runs through October 28.