For a 1971 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, my family was asked to pose for a Thanksgiving photo shoot re-creating my grandfather’s painting Freedom From Want. We had to sit for hours at a dining table at the local inn, staring at food we weren’t supposed to eat. My mother later told me that the food was treated with something inedible to make it look shiny. We left hungry and exhausted. I was two years old.
My mother, a painter herself, often liked to point out that there was hardly any food on the table in the original painting either. This was a design trick, she explained, her tone half derisive, half admiring. The white tablecloth filling the bottom half of the frame keeps the focus on the smiling faces around the table. The only food item—besides some celery and pickles, a couple of small aspics, and a heap of foregrounded fruit—is the enormous turkey, not yet on the table. And still, for many people, the scene—the perfect Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving—conjures feelings of plenty.
Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series was commissioned by The Saturday Evening Post in 1943 to illustrate a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoting core American principles that needed defending—a way to sell the necessity of military involvement in World War II to the American public. Freedom From Want was meant to illustrate our food abundance—by far the most concrete freedom, what with the others being freedom of speech, freedom from fear, and freedom of worship.
But the painting’s original propagandistic intent has long since seeped away, and now it is seen by fans and detractors alike as an exemplar of the quintessential American Thanksgiving. Memes of the painting proliferate, and every November I can expect to be sent half a dozen spoofs. Often the sender asks, whether in jest or earnest, “Is this how it was when you were a child?”
Not only has the painting cemented in the popular imagination an ideal Thanksgiving celebration—whatever that means—but it is also presumed to be documentary: This must have been how Thanksgiving went down in Norman Rockwell’s home is what people think. Or even, This must be Rockwell’s family. Once, several years ago, I overheard a woman in the changing room at the local community center discussing her plans for Thanksgiving, which would take place in a few days. “Every year,” she lamented, “I prepare for Thanksgiving as though Norman Rockwell’s family is going to come, and instead it’s my own family that shows up.” Of course, it’s not his actual family in that painting but an assemblage of models, many of whom were photographed separately from one another before being united for the first time on canvas.
With that said, Thanksgiving at my grandfather’s house did, in fact, bear some resemblance to the painting. All the appropriate foods were served and eaten, and the proper chinaware was used. Someone’s ancestors, perhaps his wife’s, glowered down at us from heavy golden frames. They looked like Puritans (perhaps they were?), clad in black with stiff white collars. The children were to sit obediently at the table until we could no longer stand it. Then we were allowed to rush off to the next room, where there was an enormous television framed in faux wood—an impressive, solid piece of furniture. After a viewing of Godzilla or King Kong, which terrified me, or the latest television drama, it was always a relief to eventually gather again for apple pie and vanilla ice cream and wait for my grandfather’s epigrammatic pronouncements, such as, “Over the teeth, through the gums, look out stomach, here it comes!”
The stage set can be perfect, but that won’t stop the people from fitting jaggedly within it. My grandfather was an artist, after all—and a workaholic. He may have enjoyed the holiday on some level, but his head was always in the studio. Family togetherness was something he excelled at portraying on canvas: heartwarming tableaux of family members for which numerous unrelated neighbors and townspeople he had spotted around Arlington, Vermont, had posed. When I was small, he seemed detached.
And then there were my bohemian artist parents, a pair of bomb throwers even on their best behavior. Neither of them could keep from nudging at propriety, always eager to see what lay beneath. And while my father, as the son and heir, could be allowed his eccentricities, my mother was another matter. With her polio limp, her paint-stained blue jeans, and her perennially bare feet; her crooked teeth and Maryland drawl; her shocking outspokenness and huge, brightly colored paintings, surely she must have looked incongruous at the family dinner table—even in the ’60s.
My parents felt overwhelmed, crushed even, by my grandfather’s reputation and his skill. To counteract this burden, they spoke frequently about the distinction between illustration and fine art. At 94, my father still brings it up. It was a distinction that my grandfather himself considered meaningful. As a mere illustrator, he felt inferior. He had high hopes for his eldest son, my father, becoming a true fine artist, but the things my father produced mystified him.
One of my father’s drawings—a large pen, ink, and watercolor work on illustration board—hung framed over my grandfather’s mantle. It portrays a dark, sepia-washed, pseudo-abstract postindustrial hellscape with a single white spotlight on one side. Night after night, over cocktails, my grandfather would point to this spot, interrupting whatever the conversation might have been, and ask pensively, “Jerry, what’s that white spot over there?” Over the years, I have heard my father give a never-ending series of answers to this question; one sticks out in my mind because he said it to my husband years later: “It’s the inside of the outside of the backside of beyond.”
The fine-art–versus-illustration distinction was one both of my parents agreed with wholeheartedly, placing themselves on the loftier end. My understanding, as a child, was that the divide was defined by two factors. The first was money. An illustrator makes art for money and gets paid, whereas a fine artist is not motivated by such mundane matters and makes art because they must. The other factor involves inspiration. It follows from the money issue that since an illustrator is getting paid, they must therefore be inspired by money, which is obviously impure. Otherwise, inspiration comes from the prompts supplied by the employer: Easter, toothpaste, family vacations, Boy Scouts, wartime propaganda, and so on. For a fine artist, inspiration comes from either above or within and is a harsh mistress. You never know when it will appear. It can abandon you for years on end. This distinction makes being a fine artist (or just an artist, for my mother, who generally dropped the fine from the title) a precarious existence, financially, emotionally, and spiritually. The reward in choosing this path, however, is that it is inherently superior.
When I was five, my parents divorced amicably. Soon afterward, my mother was summarily banished from The Perfect Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving. It had never occurred to her that such a banishment would take place, but of course there was no room for exes at such a table. To be honest, she should have seen it coming. In later years, she liked to tell a story from the time she and my father got engaged, circa 1966, when my grandfather was on the lookout for a pair of models to pose as young newlyweds for a new commission. My mother suggested that he choose the two of them, as they themselves were soon to be newlyweds. He scoffed at the thought, deeming my parents all wrong. (I’ve never figured out what painting this was or if he ever made it, but I imagine something like a 1960s update of his 1955 work The Marriage License.)
Years later, I discovered in my grandfather’s museum archive a series of professional photographs of my newly engaged parents sitting with him. The two of them had clearly put enormous effort into appearing respectable for the photo. My father’s hair is slicked back. He wears a nice, clean polo shirt. My mother is dressed in a demure tailored sundress. She always made her own clothes in bright, popping colors and prints, but this one is light blue with small white flowers. I am sure she made it as well, but it looks like a special costume for her role as the bride. But both of their facial expressions give them away. They laugh and smirk irreverently while my grandfather looks on, vaguely annoyed.
In that first year of The Banishment, my father told my mother over the phone that she was not invited to Thanksgiving and cruelly instructed her to drop me off at my grandfather’s house in time for dinner. She had never understood boundaries and could not fathom why our rituals would change just because of a divorce. She drove me into town through an early snowfall, sobbing the whole way.
Ultimately, my mother’s worldview prevailed. After my grandfather died in 1978, she established a boundaryless Christmas ritual, a funhouse mirror of the perfect Rockwell Thanksgiving. Fed up with all the competing schedules of a growing chain of divorced couples and their children, she invited everyone to celebrate Ex-mas. This included her new husband; my father and his new wife; her two children from a previous marriage; her ex-husband and his girlfriend; and her two children from a previous relationship. The father of these last children was unable to attend; it was said he was in prison in Spain for drug trafficking. My stepfather, a set designer, took endless formal family portraits of all possible combinations of people, using old-fashioned props such as hats, canes, and feather boas. One year, the entire party joined hands and danced around the outside of the house, singing carols.
I often wish I could have described that almost pagan ritual to the woman I overheard despairing that her own family always showed up to Thanksgiving instead of Norman Rockwell’s. Perhaps it would have cheered her to know that the Rockwell clan was just another unruly bunch weighted down with all the usual familial baggage. Freedom From Want, a painting intended to remind us of the plenty in our lives, has come instead to function as a reminder of what we lack, an unachievable ideal of comity and togetherness. Truly it was an illusion all along.