Norman Rockwell: The Complete Story
Norman Rockwell painted 321 covers for the Saturday Evening Post over 47 years, and then, at nearly 70, painted a six-year-old Black girl walking to school between federal marshals. The sentimentalist ended as the sharpest civil rights painter in America.
His Four Freedoms sold 132 million dollars of war bonds. His late work hangs outside the Oval Office. The story is better than the reputation.
Norman Rockwell at a glance:
1894: born in New York City; art school by 14, art director of Boys' Life by 19.
1916: first Saturday Evening Post cover at 22; there will be 321 more over 47 years.
1943: the Four Freedoms tour raises over 130 million dollars in war bonds; weeks later his studio burns down.
1953: the family moves to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, close to the Austen Riggs psychiatric center.
1978: dies in Stockbridge; the museum with his archive of 100,000 photographs opens its big building in 1993.
A boy wonder of the golden age
Rockwell was born in New York on February 3, 1894, was art director of Boys' Life magazine at 19, and sold his first Saturday Evening Post cover on May 20, 1916, at 22. For the next 47 years, through 321 covers, he was the most looked-at painter in the United States, working from staged photographs of his neighbors, first in Arlington, Vermont, then Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
1943: the Four Freedoms
Inspired by Roosevelt's speech, Rockwell painted Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear in seven months of 1942 and 1943, losing 15 pounds in the effort. The government had turned the idea down; the Post ran them, the Treasury took the originals on tour, and the exhibition sold about 132 million dollars in war bonds, the most effective war art in American history.
More incredible painter stories
If Norman Rockwell pulled you in, you will love these too:
1963: leaving the Post, finding the fight
When the Post's politics and formulas wore him down, Rockwell left in 1963 for Look magazine and, at 69, changed subject.
The Problem We All Live With, published in January 1964, shows Ruby Bridges, six years old, escorted by four faceless US marshals past a wall smeared with a slur and a thrown tomato.
Southern Justice followed in 1965, on the murders of civil rights workers in Mississippi. The grandfather of American coziness had been waiting decades to say it plainly.
The myth of the sentimental hack
Modernist criticism used his name as an insult for half a century.
Three answers have aged well: the craft, draftsmanship and staging that survive any museum wall; the late civil rights pictures, which required real commercial courage; and the reappraisal, sealed when a major retrospective toured to the Guggenheim in 2001 and when Saying Grace sold for 46 million dollars in 2013.
Rockwell himself never claimed more than he was: I paint life as I would like it to be, he said, and knew exactly what he was leaving out until 1964, when he stopped leaving it out.
Stockbridge, and where to see him
Rockwell received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and died in Stockbridge on November 8, 1978, at 84. The Norman Rockwell Museum there holds the largest collection, including Four Freedoms, plus his relocated studio.
In 2011 President Obama hung The Problem We All Live With outside the Oval Office and welcomed Ruby Bridges, then 56, to stand in front of her six-year-old self.
Photography, admitted
From the late 1930s he worked from photographs and eventually said so in print, with relief. Sessions ran like film shoots: neighbors cast as actors, props borrowed, hundreds of frames per picture.
He acted every pose himself first, grimacing across the studio until the model understood which exact despair or delight was required.
The paintings are edited composites, a face from one shot, hands from another: montage in oil, years before ad agencies made the method ordinary.
The analyst's patient
Stockbridge was chosen partly for the Austen Riggs Center: Mary Rockwell was in treatment there, and Rockwell himself saw the analyst Erik Erikson.
Erikson is said to have told him that he painted his happiness but did not live it. The Triple Self-Portrait wears that sentence lightly, on purpose.
The cheer was a discipline rather than a temperament, and the gap between the two is what modern re-evaluations keep finding in the late work.
The fire of 1943
Weeks after the Four Freedoms triumph, his Vermont studio burned to the ground with costumes, props and dozens of originals.
He answered in character: a comic illustrated report of the disaster for the Post, drawn while the ashes were still warm.
The fire explains gaps in the early record, and the jaunty cartoon explains the man: grief, processed as deadline humor.
The Norman Rockwell questions that keep coming up
How many Post covers did Rockwell paint? 321, from 1916 to 1963, the longest and most visible run any American artist has had with a single publication.
What is The Problem We All Live With? His 1964 painting of Ruby Bridges integrating a New Orleans school under federal escort, published in Look and now the emblem of his late civil rights period.
How much is a Rockwell worth? Saying Grace brought 46 million dollars at auction in 2013, the record for American illustration.
Where can I see Rockwell? The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with his studio preserved, and the Four Freedoms on permanent view.
Did Rockwell call himself an artist? He said illustrator without apology, and kept reproductions of Rembrandt and Bruegel in the studio so the bar stayed visible.
Who modeled for him? Arlington and Stockbridge neighbors by the hundreds, the same faces recurring for decades, aging in public. Paid, photographed and made permanent in an afternoon.
More secrets to unlock
The armband still says deputy
In 2011 Ruby Bridges stood beside President Obama in the White House, looking at the painting of her own first day of school. Rockwell had been dead 33 years; the marshal's armband in the picture still says deputy. The sentimental painter's least sentimental picture had outlasted the century's doubts about him.
