Christie’s; and, by the turn of the next century, those few collectors interested in his work could find three landscapes available at Florida and New York galleries, ranging in price from $4,000 to $20,000. The dealers did not realize that Thomas Howard Hill was Norman Rockwell’s grandfather; indeed, the only name connection that has inflated Hill’s prices has been the periodic, ever-present confusion with “the” Thomas Hill.
Although Howard Hill would be dead before his grandson was born, he lived on emphatically in the daughter who held him in contempt, Norman Rockwell’s mother. Nancy Hill had grown into a petite woman who, in spite of her ladylike ways, was a “real character,” as Mary Amy Orpen chuckles. “Yes, she acted like she hated her father, saying he was a bum, but she was so colorful herself, it’s hard not to think she was deeply influenced by him.” If the five-foot-two-inch-tall woman raged against her father’s outrageous behavior, she was no stranger to such extremes herself. By the age of twenty-two, around the time she moved in with her married sister, Susan Hill Orpen, Nancy Hill had developed into a complicated young adult. Often extraordinarily demanding—“she got what she wanted”—she was soft and decoratively feminine, strong-willed and active, victimized and anxious. She also suffered from depression, what she and others called her “nerves.” As she aged, she regaled visitors with stories of her miserable childhood, or, depending on her mood, entertained them by pulling out the fur collar her mother had worn to be presented at court. More than one person believed her to be very lucky to find a man like Waring Rockwell to make of her his almost pet.
Professions of English blue blood aside, Nancy Hill’s family did not come close to enjoying the prestigious pedigree of the one she married into. A genealogist who has thoroughly researched the Rockwell family tree reflects, “It’s almost as if Norman Rockwell had been created to represent America—it’s amazing how many towns have a Rockwell as their founder.” If historian David Hackett Fischer is correct to claim that of the four major English migrations to the United States, the first wave of Puritans to reach the American shores in the 1630s and ’40s encapsulated the values of what would become the American standard, then the country could do worse than anoint Rockwell its representative. “A people of substance, character, and deep personal piety,” the initial immigrant tide was remarkably homogenous compared to the groups that followed. These early pioneers traveled in family units, typically with “exceptionally literate, highly skilled, and heavily urban” heads of household. This Yankee strand, with its potent mixture of tolerance, liberality, emotional distance, and judicial standards, with its Abrahams and Rachels and Jonathans who pushed their way across Connecticut and Massachusetts, finally stopping in New York, would brand America, for better and worse, with habits of mind and body that triumphed as the substance of a democracy.
And in 1862, even as Thomas Howard and Anne Elizabeth Hill arranged their passages to the United States of America, John William Rockwell and Phoebe Boyce Waring, both of Yonkers, New York, were on the verge of combining two great Yankee families through their marriage.
John Rockwell’s father and mother—Norman’s great-grandparents—were Samuel and Oril Sherman Rockwell. Born in 1810 to well-to-do farmers in Ridgebury, Connecticut, “whose Christian fidelity made a happy home,” according to a history of Westchester County, Samuel was apprenticed when he was fifteen years old to a watchmaker and jeweler in Manhattan. After twelve years of applying “more than ordinary natural aptitude for the business,” the twenty-seven-year-old man bought the modest establishment and developed it into a “flourishing and profitable business.” In 1844, Samuel built a modest
Although Howard Hill would be dead before his grandson was born, he lived on emphatically in the daughter who held him in contempt, Norman Rockwell’s mother. Nancy Hill had grown into a petite woman who, in spite of her ladylike ways, was a “real character,” as Mary Amy Orpen chuckles. “Yes, she acted like she hated her father, saying he was a bum, but she was so colorful herself, it’s hard not to think she was deeply influenced by him.” If the five-foot-two-inch-tall woman raged against her father’s outrageous behavior, she was no stranger to such extremes herself. By the age of twenty-two, around the time she moved in with her married sister, Susan Hill Orpen, Nancy Hill had developed into a complicated young adult. Often extraordinarily demanding—“she got what she wanted”—she was soft and decoratively feminine, strong-willed and active, victimized and anxious. She also suffered from depression, what she and others called her “nerves.” As she aged, she regaled visitors with stories of her miserable childhood, or, depending on her mood, entertained them by pulling out the fur collar her mother had worn to be presented at court. More than one person believed her to be very lucky to find a man like Waring Rockwell to make of her his almost pet.
Professions of English blue blood aside, Nancy Hill’s family did not come close to enjoying the prestigious pedigree of the one she married into. A genealogist who has thoroughly researched the Rockwell family tree reflects, “It’s almost as if Norman Rockwell had been created to represent America—it’s amazing how many towns have a Rockwell as their founder.” If historian David Hackett Fischer is correct to claim that of the four major English migrations to the United States, the first wave of Puritans to reach the American shores in the 1630s and ’40s encapsulated the values of what would become the American standard, then the country could do worse than anoint Rockwell its representative. “A people of substance, character, and deep personal piety,” the initial immigrant tide was remarkably homogenous compared to the groups that followed. These early pioneers traveled in family units, typically with “exceptionally literate, highly skilled, and heavily urban” heads of household. This Yankee strand, with its potent mixture of tolerance, liberality, emotional distance, and judicial standards, with its Abrahams and Rachels and Jonathans who pushed their way across Connecticut and Massachusetts, finally stopping in New York, would brand America, for better and worse, with habits of mind and body that triumphed as the substance of a democracy.
And in 1862, even as Thomas Howard and Anne Elizabeth Hill arranged their passages to the United States of America, John William Rockwell and Phoebe Boyce Waring, both of Yonkers, New York, were on the verge of combining two great Yankee families through their marriage.
John Rockwell’s father and mother—Norman’s great-grandparents—were Samuel and Oril Sherman Rockwell. Born in 1810 to well-to-do farmers in Ridgebury, Connecticut, “whose Christian fidelity made a happy home,” according to a history of Westchester County, Samuel was apprenticed when he was fifteen years old to a watchmaker and jeweler in Manhattan. After twelve years of applying “more than ordinary natural aptitude for the business,” the twenty-seven-year-old man bought the modest establishment and developed it into a “flourishing and profitable business.” In 1844, Samuel built a modest
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