Gamebird and Family

English

Howard Hill (1823-1888)
Gamebird and Family, c. 1865
Oil on panel
Norman Rockwell Museum Collection,
Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust, NRACT.1976.134

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

My grandfather’s name was Thomas Hill. He was an Englishman. He had studied art in London. He had also, perhaps the greatest event in his life, he had sung a solo as a boy in front of Queen Victoria, and I gather he never kind of got over that glamorous moment.

He came over… He was married in England, to my grandmother, this was my mother’s father and mother, and he came over to United States on a sailing vessel and they went to Yonkers, New York. He had hoped to open up a studio there as a portrait painter and a landscape painter. This didn’t work out very well, for a number of reasons, which I’ll go into.

And instead of being a fine portrait painter and an artist of distinction, he made his living by two things. One thing he used to do, he’d go around to various farmers and homeowners of, I guess, comparative wealth there in Yonkers, and if they had a pet dog, he would make a painting of it. Or if they had a pet cow or anything like that. Or even he’d make a painting of the house itself. And he did all of these in very, very great detail, which was the custom of that time. I mean, every hair on the dog and the highlight in the cat’s eye, and all that sort of thing. And he did those.

He didn’t make a complete living out of that, so he used to do what we call potboilers. See, he and my grandmother had nine children, and he also hit the bottle pretty frequently, I gather, from what I’ve heard from my different aunts and so on, and from my mother. So he used to paint these pictures. My mother told me he used to get $25 for the picture with the frame, and without the frame it was $15. In other words, the frame was $10 and the picture was $15.

I’ve seen a couple of these pictures. They were… for instance, there would be a moonlight lake, a real old chromo, and there would be a beautiful Indian maiden sitting in a canoe, and with a reflection in the lake and so on. What he would do, he would start in and he would paint the Indian maiden and the canoe, and then mother would put in the moon and somebody else would put in the sky, and maybe my Uncle Percy or Uncle Tom would paint the reflections of the canoe in the lake. These were potboilers, he made some money that way.