Saving a door into the Rockwellian past

When voters in Cambridge, N.Y., decided the town school was due for a renovation, science teacher Steve Butz knew there was one piece of the 1950 building that deserved to be preserved: the door to the principal’s office.

The plain door once served as a model for one of Norman Rockwell’s paintings, Girl With Black Eye, also known as The Shiner and Triumph in Defeat.

In 1953, Rockwell drove the short distance from his studio in Arlington, Vt., to Cambridge, where he found inspiration for his depiction of a schoolgirl awaiting her turn in the principal’s office after getting into a fight.

Rockwell took photographs of the principal’s office and the door as well as the principal and his secretary. He even had the door taken off its hinges and brought to his studio. Later, he photographed models standing in for the principal and secretary.

The resulting artwork for The Shiner appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post’s edition of May 23, 1953. The original oil painting is part of the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, Conn.

Butz received approval to preserve the door as part of an exhibit on the school’s key role in one of Rockwell’s most famous works.

It has been in a glass display case near the school’s library since November, accompanied by some of Rockwell’s black-and-white reference photos and a framed copy of the Saturday Evening Post cover.