Norman Rockwell's "The Rookie" goes to auction

[terrisus]

Wasn't sure if this was main-board worthy, but it is Red Sox-related anyway.
 
Norman Rockwell's "The Rookie" goes to auction
 

 
The painting appeared on the cover of the March 2, 1957, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. The title is: "The Rookie (Red Sox Locker Room)." Christie's is offering it May 22 with a pre-sale estimate of $20 million to $30 million.

The painting shows pitcher Frank Sullivan, right fielder Jackie Jensen, catcher Sammy White, second baseman Billy Goodman and Hall of Famer Ted Williams.

The anonymous owner acquired it in 1986.

The painting was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2005 and '08.

 
 

 
 
I'm not the biggest fan of art in general, but I've always really liked this piece of work.
Hopefully it makes its way back to a museum somehow.

 

[RG33]

$100

 

[TheYaz67]

Think you are several 0000s short.  But I would bid on a Rip version of that piece...

 

[Saints Rest]

I have a nice framed print of that piece hanging in my office.

 

[Al Zarilla]

Wasn't sure if this was main-board worthy, but it is Red Sox-related anyway.
 
Norman Rockwell's "The Rookie" goes to auction
 
 
 

 
 
I'm not the biggest fan of art in general, but I've always really liked this piece of work.
Hopefully it makes its way back to a museum somehow.

Williams: "Jesus, look at this rube".

 

[The Talented Allen Ripley]

I have a tie with that painting screened on it. I used to wear it every Opening Day, but it's been years since I've had a job that required a tie.
 
Business casual's silent victim.

 

[mabrowndog]

The first comment on that ESPN article is brilliant:
 
"I'll give you $75 for the painting." -- Rick from Pawn Stars

 

[Norm Siebern]

"I have to have it framed, mounted, with glass. Then it may it lay around here for months, taking up valuable space on the wall. I Have to have just the right customer come in. Now, if it was Colin Kaepernick, maybe I could offer you more. Baseball's just not as big as it once was."

 

[mabrowndog]

More on the piece and its really cool history
 

Real Red Soxers filled out the scene: Lower left was Sammy White, and the other two players sitting were Frank Sullivan and Jackie Jensen. Behind the rookie, Billy Goodman is wiping away the smile. These gracious gents visited Rockwell to pose, meeting the neighbors while they were there, making the artist even more of a hero to the townsfolk (in Stockbridge, Massachusetts).
 
The shirtless guy to the left was referred to by Rockwell as “John J. Anonymous,” who once tried out for the Red Sox. He was thrilled when “manager” Rockwell put him in the line-up. Ted Williams stands in the middle, which was a good trick, since he couldn’t make it to the studio. The artist used a stand-in and consulted his baseball card collection to get Williams’ profile. He always knew that bubble gum would come in handy.

 
The Sox also sent a bunch of photos of Williams to Rockwell, but none depicted him in anything close to the desired pose. Turns out Rockwell's choice as the Splinter's stand-in was Sullivan -- from the neck down.
 
In 2009 the Berkshire Eagle had an article on Sherman Safford. He was the 17-year-old Pittsfield (MA) High School student who modeled for the painting's primary subject. At the time of the article, he was 70 and living in Rochester, NY:
 

Safford was having lunch at PHS and Rockwell was in the cafeteria and on the prowl. The legendary illustrator had a vision for the Post baseball spring training cover, but he needed someone to play the "hayseed" whose wide-eyed role in the painting was to introduce himself to the Red Sox veterans in the clubhouse.
 
"I got into line for lunch and walked right past him [Rockwell]," Safford recalled. "Then I got lunch and walked past him again on the way back to my table. A friend, Dave Farrell, came over to me and told me that the guy with the long thin pipe was Norman Rockwell, and that he wanted to see me when I was done with lunch. He was a very distinctive-looking character.
 
"I knew who Mr. Rockwell was and immediately pushed the tray away and said ‘to heck with lunch.' If Norman Rockwell wanted to talk to me, then I wanted to talk to him."
 
Rockwell told Safford about his idea for the magazine cover and how he thought the tall and lanky 17-year-old was a perfect candidate to play "The Rookie."
 
"He asked me if I knew where his studio was in Stockbridge, which I did," Safford said. He said to be there on that next Saturday at 10 a.m. I actually posed twice for him and received $60 each time.
 
"I used that money to play for my car insurance, but I wished I had kept those checks as keepsakes."
 
Safford said he had a chance to talk with Rockwell at length on those two Saturday mornings.
 
"People don't always know that he worked a lot from photographs," Safford said. "He went to Sarasota and also took pictures of that locker room."
 
Being selected by Rockwell, said Safford, was "an amazing moment."
 
Added Safford, "They say we all get 15 minutes in the sun. To have been picked from the entire school was truly a wonderful occurrence."

 

[mabrowndog]

Another write-up from 2009 (centered on the demise of Sarasota as a Spring Training venue) with comments from Safford (shown below) and Frank Sullivan:
 

 

 
Safford said Rockwell came to Sarasota and photographed the Payne Park clubhouse using an old camera with a cloth top.
 
He always did his illustrations off the photos he shot.
 
Unlike the illustration that appeared in the magazine, there weren’t palm trees outside the window, so Rockwell added them to give a Sarasota feel.
 
He also omitted the snuffed-out cigarettes he photographed on the clubhouse floor.

 
There are those who feel Rockwell painted a less-than-flattering rendition of Williams’ face.
 
“I think Rockwell did that as a joke on Ted because he was too big to come down and get his picture taken,” Safford said.
 
Sullivan, a teammate of Williams, said the Hall of Famer never mentioned it.
 
“He must have been upset about his head,” Sullivan said. “He was a good looking a guy ... but ooh.”

 
Sullivan and Safford are the only two people in the picture alive today.
 
They only recently came into contact with each other after the cover was on display a few years ago in a Boston museum.
 
The 79-year-old Sullivan has lived in Kauai, Hawaii since 1964 and is retired from the golf business.
 
He remembers reluctantly agreeing to drive three hours with the other players on an off-day to have lunch with “this little skinny guy” and then pose inside his studio.
 
The players forgot about it until the next year when they found themselves on the cover of one of the most popular magazines in America.
 
“It was wonderful,” said Sullivan, “and by that time we knew who the hell he (Rockwell) was.”

 
Safford was in the Army the following year when the magazine came out, stationed in Fort Dix.
 
His mother called with the news.
 
He wasn’t allowed out of the barracks, but he busted through a door anyway and came back with an armload of magazines.
 
His angry commander was waiting for him.
 
“The platoon sergeant said, ‘I think you’re in big trouble’ but I was so pumped up I didn’t give a damn.
 
“I said, ‘I’m on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.’”
 
And sure enough, on the index page as proof, Safford’s name was there along with those of the players.
 
The magazine became an exhibit inside the Hall of Fame.
 
“I made it into the Hall of Fame before my heroes did,” Safford said.
 
Safford, who never saw Rockwell again after the day he posed, still has a few signed copies. He thinks the original illustration is out there somewhere.
 
“This is a part of America and a very popular part of America,” he said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if you could get one or two million dollars out of it.”

 

 

[mabrowndog]

This great Sports Illustrated piece from the 2012 Baseball Preview issue, on a unique connection between Sullivan and Mickey Mantle, details Frank's posing work for Rockwell. It also includes commentary from Safford, and theorizes that Mantle, while clearly not the rookie depicted, may have served as an inspiration of sorts.
 
It picks up on September 23, two days after Sully surrendered Mantle's 51st homer of the season:
 

 
After Sunday's game Tom Dowd, the Red Sox' traveling secretary, arrived in the losers' clubhouse with orders for Sullivan, catcher Sammy White and rightfielder Jackie Jensen: They were to report to a studio in Stockbridge, Mass., the next day. They weren't given a choice, and it didn't occur to them that they had one. Williams, whose presence had also been requested, was not about to drive clear across the state to pose for anybody on his day off, in the middle of a race for the batting title, but he agreed to allow the artist, a guy named Norman Rockwell, to use his likeness.

 

 
"I didn't know who the hell he was," Frank says. "We were told by the Red Sox to take our uniforms and go. Jesus, it was a whole long way. There was no freeway in those days, three hours there and three hours back—and he served iced tea for lunch!"
 
Then Rockwell ushered them into his spartan studio, where a facsimile of the Red Sox's spring training locker room in Sarasota, Fla., had been created. There were makeshift lockers with handwritten nameplates and a rudimentary bench constructed by Rockwell's studio assistant, Louie Lamone. The artist littered the floor with matchbooks, crumpled paper cups and dirty towels. He filled the lockers with liniment bottles and towels and baseball gloves. Frank hung his aloha shirt and his sport jacket on a hook and put on his uniform and posed for an hour. Rockwell told the players where and how to sit, where and how to look. Then his photographer, Bill Scoville, began shooting.
 
"He just kept telling us to keep looking up," Frank says. At what? He wasn't sure. Rockwell didn't explain the composition he envisioned or the assignment from The Saturday Evening Post, which had commissioned the painting for its cover. "He was a little meek, pipe-smoking guy, very polite," Frank says. "He wanted me to sit there with my arm on Jensen's shoulder," affecting locker room intimacy. Rockwell stationed White on the bench to Sully's right and a bare-chested studio assistant behind him. Rockwell called the assistant John J. Anonymous, a stand-in for all the forgettables who managed a line in The Baseball Encyclopedia.
 
Then he told Frank to stand at Williams's locker and pretend he was the Splendid Splinter. Rockwell would put Ted's head on Frank's body later.
 
Ledgers at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge show that a check for $100 was issued to each of the players. "I never saw mine," says Frank, who should have gotten paid twice.

 
A few weeks later, on Oct. 20, Mickey Mantle's 25th birthday, a high school senior from Pittsfield, Mass., arrived at Rockwell's studio to fill out the composition. Sherman Safford, who actually preferred basketball to baseball, had been recruited to pose for Rockwell as the Rookie in his eponymous painting. "Picked me out of a chow line," Safford recalls a half century later.
 
He was a tall, gangly, California-raised boy. He had an open, expectant face that was full of promise, the look Rockwell was searching for. He called Safford's mother with a list of instructions about what her boy was to bring and to wear. He was to show up with a five-fingered fielder's glove, which he didn't own, and a bat. "He didn't want me to wear Levis," Sherm says. "He said, 'See if you can get a seersucker coat.' And he said, 'I want a straw suitcase.' My mother found one somewhere. I think it was a picnic basket."
 
And, Rockwell told Mrs. Safford, "for God's sake don't let him cut that hair."
 
"I always got it cut once a month," Sherm says. "By the end of the month it got pretty shucky." That was the hayseed look Rockwell was after.
 
Safford arrived in brown penny loafers, chinos that were too short to cover his white wool socks, and a jacket whose sleeves didn't reach his wrists. Rockwell plunked his own fedora on Sherm's head. "He said, 'Here's what I want. Smile just as broadly as you can. Extend your hand. You're here to be the savior of the team. You're going to take them to the World Series. And you're just as proud as you can be.'"
 
Rockwell directed him to put the glove and suitcase in his left hand so he could extend a hand to the jaded vets lounging in the faux locker room. But, Sherm says, "there was something he didn't like." And on Nov. 1, Rockwell called him back to the studio. The painting was slated for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in March, when pitchers and catchers reported to spring training, and perhaps the artist realized that the rookie in his painting would have been too abashed to be so forward and outgoing, especially when confronted by the predatory glare that Rockwell fixed on Ted Williams's uninviting mug. In the final drawing, Rockwell stationed Red Sox infielder Billy Goodman (photographed separately) behind the Rookie, hand to his mouth in an attempt to stifle the grin provoked by the interloping rube.

 
The cover hit the newsstand on March 2, 1957; the Red Sox were in spring training in Sarasota. Sully noted how faithfully Rockwell had replicated their locker room—minus his aloha shirt. Rockwell got everything right but the shoes (Jensen is wearing street shoes with his uniform) and Ted Williams. "Looks awful, doesn't it?" Frank says.
 
Certainly, it didn't look anything like Ted Williams. But the title character in The Rookie looks very familiar. In fact, he looks just as Mickey Mantle did when he showed up in the Yankees' locker room in 1951, carrying a straw suitcase and, in the recollection of the late Hank Bauer, "wearing hush-puppy shoes and white sweat socks all rolled up." Like Rockwell's Rookie, he was met by a superstar's baleful glare. Joe DiMaggio was not happy to make Mantle's acquaintance. And like the face of Rockwell's Rookie, Mantle's was unclouded by doubt and freckled with possibility. "That face was special," Sully says. "You've never seen another face like that."
 
There is no allusion to Mantle in the archives at the Norman Rockwell Museum. But Rockwell, who grew up rooting for the Dodgers, was no doubt aware of Mantle's ineffable smile. By the spring of 1957, Mantle had become an American archetype. His image and his myth had become part of our collective consciousness. Perhaps that explains why The Rookie, one of Rockwell's 321 covers for The Saturday Evening Post, remains one of his most ubiquitous and merchandised illustrations. Frank has a Rookie magnet; Sherm's boss saw The Rookie on a wallpaper border at a home-improvement megastore.
 
The Rookie can be put together in a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle or assembled from a 500-piece puzzle in a tin. The Rookie adorns a 100% silk tie sold at the museum in Stockbridge and a 4¼-inch collectible plate sold at the Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont in Rutland. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston sells a Rockwell Rookie Single Coaster for $5.95, a mouse pad for $18.95 and a key chain for $2.99, which is currently out of stock. The Boston museum is where Sully, the sole surviving ballplayer on Rockwell's canvas, saw the original painting in 2005, when he attended his first major league baseball game since the Minnesota Twins put him out to pasture in 1963. He was inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame three years later.