Norman Rockwell

Illustrator

• Born: February 3, 1894
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: November 8, 1978
• Place of death: Stockbridge, Massachusetts

American painter

Rockwell is one of America’s most popular and best-known artists. His appeal lies in his ability to capture scenes of traditional American life in a way that needs no explanation.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

Norman Percevel Rockwell was born to Waring Rockwell and Nancy Hill Rockwell. He had one older brother, Jarvis. Both his father and his maternal grandfather, Howard Hill, stimulated his interest in art. Grandfather Hill, an artist born in England, came to the United States in the mid-1860’s. His paintings of animals done with meticulous care impressed Rockwell, who noted in his autobiography that this inspired him to seek accurate detail in his own work. His father, who enjoyed copying illustrations from magazines, encouraged his son’s talent for drawing. In the evenings, when his father read aloud from Charles Dickens, Rockwell visualized the scenes and drew the characters.

At the age of fifteen, Rockwell left high school to study art full time. He enrolled first at the National Academy of Design, where he got his first training in anatomy, drawing from plaster casts of famous classical sculpture. From there he went to the Art Students League, where his most influential teachers were George Bridgeman and Thomas Fogarty.

Rockwell’s career as an illustrator started early. In 1912, he published his first work, eight book illustrations for C. H. Claudy’s Tell-Me-Why Stories About Mother Nature and Gabrielle Jackson’s Maid of Middies Haven. In 1913, Fogarty encouraged Rockwell to show his drawings to the editor of Boys’ Life magazine. He was engaged to create one cover and illustrate one story per issue and was soon hired as the art editor. During his four years at the Boys’ Life, he completed two hundred illustrations. During his last year with the magazine, he started to work for The Saturday Evening Post.

Rockwell’s first Saturday Evening Post cover was published May 20, 1916, which began a forty-seven-year association with the magazine. That same year, Rockwell married Irene O’Connor, who divorced him thirteen years later. In 1930, he married Mary Barstow. They had three children Jarvis, Thomas, and Peter but Mary died in 1959. In 1961, Rockwell married Mary “Molly” Punderson, who survived him and died in 1985.

Rockwell lived in New York during his early years, mainly in New Rochelle. In 1939, he moved to Arlington, Vermont, and left there, in 1953, for Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Friends and neighbors in these towns became his models and posed in a great number of paintings.

Life’s Work

Rockwell’s capacity for work during his seventy years of professional life was enormous. He made paintings for magazine covers and illustrations for books, stories, and advertisements. An incomplete estimate lists about four thousand works. He worked on several projects at the same time. His favorite work was creating magazine covers, which allowed him freedom to develop his own ideas. Rockwell’s most famous covers were made for The Saturday Evening Post. The very first one, Boy with Baby Carriage (May 20, 1916) set the tone for most of what followed. In the painting, an elegantly dressed twelve-year-old boy is mocked by two of his buddies. They are on their way to play baseball while he must push the baby carriage. A young neighbor in Arlington, Vermont, posed for all three boys. Rockwell’s last published cover for The Saturday Evening Post (December 14, 1963), his 322d cover, commemorated the assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Since it was a reprint from 1960 to which a black border had been added, the actual number of Saturday Evening Post covers was 321.

Rockwell also illustrated books, following in the tradition of great illustrators he admired such as Howard Pyle and J. C. Leyendecker. His characteristic work method was demonstrated in the assignment to illustrate Mark Twain’s two classics, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876; Rockwell edition, 1936) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; Rockwell edition, 1940). To get the details as authentic as possible, Rockwell read the books several times and traveled to Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain’s boyhood town, to sketch the actual houses, streets, the river, and the cave. He even bought old clothes to take back home.

Rockwell also painted story illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post. The most celebrated of these are the Four Freedoms, inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech in January, 1941, to the U.S. Congress to secure the “four essential human freedoms” everywhere in the world. The paintings were published as Freedom of Speech (February 20, 1943), Freedom of Worship (February 27, 1943), Freedom from Want (March 6, 1943), and Freedom from Fear (March 13, 1943) to illustrate essays on these topics. After publication, the paintings went on a nationwide tour, the Four Freedoms War Bond Show, until May 8, 1944. About 1.2 million people saw the show and about $133 million worth of war bonds was sold to support the war effort.

In May, 1943, shortly after the War Bond tour began, Rockwell suffered a severe setback when his studio in Arlington, Vermont, was destroyed by fire. He lost everything that he had collected over the past thirty years, including the props he used in his paintings as well as finished paintings and preliminary sketches. Rather than rebuild the studio, he moved to another house in Arlington.

Despite the lighthearted appearance of Rockwell’s work, he suffered through periods of restlessness and depression. Around 1952, he felt the need to consult some mental health counsellors at the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge. One of them was Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst, who became a friend. Under Erikson’s influence, Rockwell gradually took a new approach to his art as he became more interested in social issues such as the Civil Rights movement.

After he ended his association with The Saturday Evening Post in 1963, Rockwell started to work for Look, where he began to use his talent to illustrate serious themes, such as The Problem We All Live With (January 14, 1964). Also called Ruby Bridges Goes to School, the painting was based on an incident in the South, which was still opposed to integration ten years after the Supreme Court’s decision requiring school desegregation. It depicts a shy little black girl, about six years old, being escorted to school by four tall deputy U.S. marshals. A red tomato that has just been smashed against a white wall provides a strong color accent. Another powerful painting, Southern Justice (June 20, 1965), reminds the viewer of the three black men who were murdered for their activism on behalf of civil rights in Mississippi.

Also alluding to the racial issue but with a positive message was New Kids in the Neighborhood (January 16, 1967). Three white children on the right side of the painting are looking at two black children facing them on the left. A large moving van between them is being unloaded. The five children, all about the same age, express some apprehension as well as anticipation of new playmates but no hostility. It is clear that they have several things in common. One of the white boys has baseball gloves, as does the black boy. The black girl is holding her pet, a white cat, in her arms. The white girl also has a pet, a black and brown dog, sitting at her feet. Rockwell is optimistic that all will end well.

This was a new and lesser known side of Rockwell. Although magazine editors and advertising agencies continued to commission his work, the public interest in his art had waned. In the early 1970’s, however, a revival took place. It actually began in 1968, when Bernard Danenberg, a New York art dealer, arranged an exhibition in his Madison Avenue galleries. He placed Saying Grace (1951), voted as Rockwell’s most popular painting, in the window and exhibited forty of Rockwell’s paintings in the gallery. Harry N. Abrams, a publisher of art books, noticed that while long lines of people were waiting to get into an Andrew Wyeth exhibit at the nearby Whitney Museum of American Art, no one was at the Danenberg Galleries. Abrams decided to publish a book of reproductions of Rockwell’s art as a sixty-year retrospective with a text by Thomas S. Buechner. Six years after the book was published, on November 8, 1978, Rockwell died in his home in Stockbridge.

Significance

The majority of Rockwell’s work depicts the positive side of American middle-class life. A storyteller, Rockwell captured witty or comic situations in which viewers could recognize themselves. The public loved his pictures. He helped them see the America that he had observed and that they might not have noticed.

In the debate concerning fine arts versus commercial art, a change in attitude toward Rockwell’s work is taking place, “upgrading” it to fine arts. His own appreciation of great art is evident in his painting The Connoisseur (1962), which depicts a huge modern painting in the style of Jackson Pollock. The Art Critic (1955) incorporates two seventeenth century paintings in the style of Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Hals. His Triple Self-Portrait (1960) includes copies of self-portraits by Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, and Vincent van Gogh, with a reference to a cubist portrait by Pablo Picasso.

Since the Norman Rockwell Art Museum opened in 1993, it has become increasingly clear that Rockwell’s place in American art history is secure. Located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the museum holds the world’s largest collection of original Rockwell art.

Further Reading

Buechner, Thomas S. Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective. A Catalogue of an Exhibition Organized by Bernard Danenberg Galleries, New York. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972. This is the catalogue for an exhibition of Rockwell’s work that traveled to nine U.S. museums from February 11, 1972, to April 15, 1973.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Norman Rockwell: Artist & Illustrator. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983. This book is a serious study by a Rockwell expert.

Claridge, Laura. Norman Rockwell: A Life. New York: Random House, 2001. A critical biography, in which Rockwell emerges as a driven workaholic, a difficult husband to three wives, and a distant father.

Finch, Christopher. Norman Rockwell: 322 Magazine Covers. New York: Abbeville, 1979. Finch deals with Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Norman Rockwell’s America. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975. Finch’s richly illustrated account of Rockwell’s art focuses on his magazine covers.

Halpern, Richard. Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Halpern contradicts the popular view that Rockwell depicts scenes of innocence, maintaining that some of his work contains disturbing acts of voyeurism and desire.

Marling, Karal Ann. Norman Rockwell. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1997. In this competent biography, Marling, an art historian, discusses Rockwell in the context of fine arts versus commercial art, regarding him as a great artist in both realms. Includes one hundred illustrations.

Moffatt, Laura Norton. Norman Rockwell: A Definitive Catalogue. 2 vols. Stockbridge, Mass.: The Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, 1986. Moffatt’s book illustrates all of Rockwell’s known finished paintings, in some cases with preliminary sketches and studies. It is a very useful work to get an overall view. Includes 3,594 illustrations and 96 color plates.

Murray, Stuart, and James McCabe, eds. Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms: Images That Inspire a Nation. Stockbridge, Mass.: Berkshire House, 1993. Reprint. New York: Gramercy, 1998. This book includes several essays on the Four Freedoms and a foreword by Laurie Norton Moffatt. Richly illustrated with color plates as well as early sketches and drawings of the Four Freedoms, it offers a good summary of the impact of these paintings.

Rockwell, Norman. My Adventures as an Illustrator. New York: 1994. This seemingly light-hearted autobiography gives some insight into the complexity of this artist. The final chapter of the 1994 edition covers Rockwell’s last eighteen years. Includes numerous illustrations, many in color, and a foreword and afterward by Tom Rockwell.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Norman Rockwell Album. New York: Doubleday, 1961. This handsome collection of Rockwell’s work reveals his concern for people.