Norman Rockwell Is Born in Harlem

Norman Percevel Rockwell was born on February 3, 1894, in Harlem, New York City, and lived at 789 St. Nicholas Avenue. His father, Jarvis Waring Rockwell, managed the New York office of a Philadelphia textile firm, George Wood, Sons & Company, and his mother was Anne Mary Nancy Hill Rockwell. Until he was about ten, the family spent summers on farms in the country, an escape from the city that stuck with him for the rest of his career. In 1903, when Norman was nine, the family left Manhattan for suburban Mamaroneck in Westchester County. He would go on to paint the small-town, front-porch America that people now call Rockwellian, but the man himself started out watching it from a rented apartment in Manhattan.