Credit has been given to Norman Rockwell for defining the quintessential American ideal with his covers for the Saturday Evening Post: the nuclear family crowding around a thanksgiving spread, high school dates in the midst of courtship, stoic athletes at a Saturday night football game, etc. But in rare case of queer history another name emerges. The illustrator J.C Leyendecker, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, created a name for himself doing advertisements for Arrow Collars and Shirts (using his model-turned-lover as the face for the company) and creating covers for publications like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. It was Leyendecker who invented the genre of idealistic portrayals of quaint American life.
Leyendecker was a homosexual (as was his brother, another illustrator) — and it’s uncanny how vivid and transparent his admiration for the male image was in his work. What was probably at the time interpreted as neo-classical values now belies Leyendecker’s homosexuality expressed in images that are harmonious, erotic, glorified, and raw. Rockwell in his younger days had a deep infatuation with Leyendecker going as far as to follow the illustrator and his lover to their home in New Rochelle in order for closer proximity. It was this relocation that exposed Rockwell to the small picturesque town which would become the basis for the majority of his output.
Rockwell studied his style perhaps perfecting it beyond Leyendecker’s signature hatching, a style that perfectly matched the off-hand quality of his handsome men, but lost the graphic severity of his figures and lines. While Rockwell went on to thrive in our nostalgic memory it was perhaps due only to longevity or chance that another vision of America, an especially gay one at that, did not.
