Southland Sojourns Left Their Mark on Much-Loved Artist and His Works

Pipe-smoking Norman Rockwell captured America’s heart with his illustrator’s art, but although the roots of his America were buried deep in New England, many of his famous paintings in the 1930s and ‘40s were products of a small Los Angeles area town: Alhambra.

Hailed as “America’s best-loved artist,” Rockwell painted the iconography of U.S. life: apple-cheeked children and broad-shouldered soldiers, ideals embedded in the nation’s self-image.

Amid a career that spanned much of the 20th century, he spent a few months out of every year for more than two decades in Southern California, painting everyday moments from a little-known art colony on Alhambra’s Champion Place. His friend Clyde Champion was a photographer and artist whose parents had subdivided the area around the turn of the century. And Champion built his own home, the nucleus of a cluster of quietly dedicated artists.

In 1926, American West artist Frank Tenney Johnson joined them. He built a home on the west bank of a bucolic stream known as the Alhambra Wash. He was followed by sculptor Eli Harvey and painter Jack Wilkinson Smith.

Other artists’ works poured forth from this piece of unspoiled real estate with majestic views of Mt. Baldy. During the 1930s, it was an enclave for Western artists Charles M. Russell and Ed Borein and illustrator Dean Cornwell, who painted the rotunda murals at the Los Angeles Central Library. It was also in the Alhambra art colony that sculptor Hughlette “Tex” Wheeler created a life-size statue of the famed racehorse Seabiscuit.

New York City-born Rockwell dropped out of high school at age 15 to study at art schools, and soon landed his first paying job, illustrating Christmas cards. In 1913, the Boy Scouts of America hired the 19-year-old Rockwell as art director of their magazine, Boys’ Life. He would illustrate Scout calendars and manuals for the next 50 years.

In 1916, his career really took off when he sold his first Saturday Evening Post cover, depicting a forlorn boy dressed in a suit and bowler hat, pushing a wicker baby carriage past jeering friends suited up for baseball. Over the next five decades he painted 321 more covers for the Post, including socially conscious ones such as a young black girl being escorted to school by federal marshals.

After his first marriage failed in 1930, a despondent Rockwell headed west to Alhambra to stay and work with his friend, cartoonist Clyde Forsythe. Forsythe had built a studio over his garage on the southeast corner of Almansor and Alhambra roads, just a few blocks away from Champion Place.

Rockwell knew most of the artists who lived and worked on Champion. He shared their enthusiasm for moonlight as an ideal painter’s light. The artists often sketched together all night, but when the moonlight was dim, they used miner’s helmets for illumination.

The leader of the group, painter Smith, was handsome and articulate and had a flair for entertaining. He was a founder of the Pasadena-based California Art Club, which opened an art gallery in Los Angeles’ Biltmore Hotel, where club members exhibited and sold their work.

Each day, when Rockwell wasn’t painting, he rode his bicycle through the streets of Alhambra, endearing himself to the townsfolk and looking for engaging faces for his canvases.

But when he required a 12-year-old boy with slightly tousled, flaming red hair and a toothy grin that made the viewer wonder what the boy was up to, Rockwell called Hollywood’s Central Casting, a clearinghouse for hopeful movie extras. Six boys--all possessing the required red hair and freckles--showed up in Alhambra for his inspection.

He chose Dan Grant, who by the tender age of 12 was a veteran of 32 movies. For five days, Grant sat atop a box in the Almansor Road studio posing as Tom Sawyer for Coca-Cola advertisements that appeared on calendars and serving trays. For his work, the boy received $250, a goodly sum during the Depression.

Although many locals only posed for Rockwell, one of his models was a neighbor who would become his wife and the mother of his three sons.

On April 17, 1930, Rockwell, 36, married 22-year-old Mary Barstow, a local schoolteacher and the daughter of Judge Alfred Barstow, a former Alhambra city attorney. The wedding took place at the Barstow home on Champion Place within the art colony.

After Rockwell married, he began the cross-country shuttling that was to characterize his life and career for two decades. But before he left, he painted actor Gary Cooper as a cowboy for the May 24, 1930, cover of the Post.

In the mid-1930s, during one of Rockwell’s return visits to Alhambra, he met a young boy named Johnny Moreau, a student at nearby St. Teresa’s Catholic School. Rockwell asked the boy to “round up a buddy” and sit for a painting at Forsythe’s studio. Moreau and his friend Bob Hayes made their debut as artists’ models on the cover of the Post in “Scouts of Many Trails.”

By 1939, the Rockwell family had settled in Arlington, Vt. But four years later, his studio burned down and all of his artworks were destroyed.

That triggered another trip to Alhambra. Sometimes the family stayed with Mary’s parents and sometimes in a rented house above the Sunset Strip. Once--for four months--they lived in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

Over the years, Rockwell lectured many times at the Otis Art Institute. Once he judged floats in the Rose Parade, and another time he chose a queen for the Sierra Madre wisteria festival. But painting was primary, and among his subjects was Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. William B. McKesson, Rockwell’s model for Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Although Rockwell was not a churchgoing man, he once dropped by Alhambra’s First United Methodist Church and watched as a janitor worked from a ladder. In 1945, this anonymous man made the cover of the Post, where he was shown setting the time on a clock in the Marshall Field department store.

But Rockwell’s life was nowhere nearly as idyllic as his illustrations. He painted for long hours, seven days a week, leaving the raising of the children and managing of the finances to his wife. It was not easy on either of them. In 1948, they were en route to Los Angeles again when Mary suffered a nervous breakdown from depression and alcoholism.

During this stay actress Loretta Young waltzed into Rockwell’s studio to pose for a “Murder Mystery” Post cover. The Post rejected an early version as too mystifying, and the drawing was never completed.

In 1953, the Rockwells’ bicoastal residency ended when they moved to Stockbridge, Mass. In 1959 Mary died from a combination of sleeping pills, tranquilizers and alcohol.

By the 1960s Rockwell was a celebrity among celebrities, returning to Los Angeles to do TV interviews and paint stars’ portraits. By then he had married a Stockbridge teacher, who encouraged his social conscience. Before 1964, Rockwell had rarely painted an African American, mainly because the Post had not wanted him to. But that year, he painted little Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by U.S. marshals in what became one of his most poignant works.

Rockwell died of emphysema in 1978.

Although the artists are gone and the Alhambra Wash has been straightened and turned into a concrete channel, several homes retain the studios and something of the meditative setting that once spawned the art colony on Champion Place.