Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was an American author, painter and illustrator. His works have a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades. Among the best-known of Rockwell's works are the Willie Gillis series, Rosie the Riveter, The Problem We All Live With, Saying Grace, and the Four Freedoms series. He is also noted for his 64-year relationship with the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), during which he produced covers for their publication Boys' Life, calendars, and other illustrations. These works include popular images that reflect the Scout Oath and Scout Law such as The Scoutmaster, A Scout is Reverent and A Guiding Hand, among many others.
Norman Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing more than 4,000 original works in his lifetime. Most of his works are either in public collections, or have been destroyed in fire or other misfortunes. Rockwell was also commissioned to illustrate more than 40 books, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as well as painting the portraits for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as those of foreign figures, including Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru. His portrait subjects included Judy Garland. One of his last portraits was of Colonel Sanders in 1973. His annual contributions for the Boy Scouts calendars between 1925 and 1976 (Rockwell was a 1939 recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America), were only slightly overshadowed by his most popular of calendar works: the "Four Seasons" illustrations for Brown & Bigelow that were published for 17 years beginning in 1947 and reproduced in various styles and sizes since 1964. He painted six images for Coca-Cola advertising. Illustrations for booklets, catalogs, posters (particularly movie promotions), sheet music, stamps, playing cards, and murals (including "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "God Bless the Hills", which was completed in 1936 for the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey) rounded out Rockwell's œuvre as an illustrator.
The painting depicts a woman and a young boy saying grace in a crowded restaurant, as they are observed by other people at their table. Rockwell's inspiration for Saying Grace came from a Saturday Evening Post reader who saw a Mennonite family praying in a restaurant. Rockwell used his son, Jarvis, as one of the models for the painting. Elizabeth Goldberg, director of American Art at Sotheby's said that in his preparations for Saying Grace Rockwell "... visited Automats and diners in New York and Philadelphia to get the scene just right ... his imagery was so vivid people would say they recognized the diner even though it didn't exist, each painting felt so universal." Rockwell took the table and chairs from a diner in Times Square for the photo shoot for the painting. In preparations for a painting Rockwell would set up a scene, using his friends and neighbors, taking hundreds of photos until satisfied. Rockwell would produce sketches in charcoal, then oil sketches, before painting the final image. Read more...
Breaking Home Ties is a painting by American illustrator Norman Rockwell, created for the September 25, 1954, cover of The Saturday Evening Post. The picture represents a father and son waiting for a train that will take the young man to the state university. The painting, considered by experts to be one of Rockwell's masterworks, is also one of the most widely reproduced, and was voted the second-most popular image in Post history. Read more...
Growth of a Leader is a 1964 painting by Norman Rockwell. It appeared as the 1966 Brown & Bigelow Boy Scout Calendar. Long-time Rockwell model James Edgerton and his son are depicted as a Scout moving though the stages of a man's Scouting career. Read more...
Russian Schoolroom (1967) — also known as The Russian Classroom and Russian Schoolchildren — is an oil on canvas painting created by American illustratorNorman Rockwell (1894–1978) and commissioned by Look magazine. It depicts Russian schoolchildren in a classroom with a bust of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.
This series has been the cornerstone of retrospective art exhibits presenting the career of Rockwell, who was the most widely known and popular commercial artist of the mid-20th century, but did not achieve critical acclaim. These are his best-known works, and by some accounts became the most widely distributed paintings. At one time they were commonly displayed in post offices, schools, clubs, railroad stations, and a variety of public and semi-public buildings. Read more...
The Problem We All Live With is a 1964 painting by Norman Rockwell. It is considered an iconic image of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. It depicts Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old African American girl, on her way to William Frantz Elementary School, an all-white public school, on November 14, 1960, during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis. Because of threats and violence against her, she is escorted by four deputy U.S. marshals; the painting is framed such that the marshals' heads are cropped at the shoulders. On the wall behind her is written the racial slur "nigger" and the letters "KKK"; a smashed and splattered tomato thrown against the wall is also visible. The white protesters are not visible, as the viewer is looking at the scene from their point of view. The painting is oil on canvas and measures 36 inches (91 cm) high by 58 inches (150 cm) wide. Read more...
The painting depicts several Boston Red Sox baseball players in a locker room, joined by an apparent new player who is dressed in street clothes and carrying a suitcase, along with his baseball glove and baseball bat. The painting was sold in a 2014 auction for over twenty million dollars. Read more...
The painting depicts a husband and wife with their three children walking to church through a city street. Walking to Church had been on a long-term loan at the Norman Rockwell Museum before its 2013 sale. Read more...
Tough Call – also known as Game Called Because of Rain, Bottom of the Sixth, or The Three Umpires – is a 1948 painting by American artist Norman Rockwell, painted for the April 23, 1949, cover of The Saturday Evening Post magazine. The original painting is in the collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. It is considered the best known of Rockwell's baseball-themed works, and appears in at least ten Rockwell commentary books.
The painting is set at a ballpark, where a group of three baseball umpires is looking skyward, as rain is starting to fall. Behind them is a scoreboard showing the game to be in the bottom of the 6th inning, with the Pittsburgh Pirates leading the Brooklyn Dodgers by a score of 1–0. Also shown is a Brooklyn coach or manager in conversation with his Pittsburgh counterpart. Read more...
Willie Gillis, Jr. (more commonly simply Willie Gillis) is a fictional character created by Norman Rockwell for a series of World War II paintings that appeared on the covers of eleven issues of The Saturday Evening Post between 1941 and 1946. With the rank of private, Gillis was an everyman whose career was tracked on the cover of the Post from induction through discharge without being depicted in battle. Gillis and his girlfriend were modeled by two of Rockwell's acquaintances.
Although Gillis was not exclusively used on Post covers, the Willie Gillis series of covers was a hallmark of Rockwell's wartime work. In Rockwell's prime and at the peak of its popularity, the Post had a subscribership of 4 million, and many of these subscribers believed Gillis was a real person. Rockwell's wartime art, including Willie Gillis, the Four Freedoms and Rosie the Riveter, contributed to the success of the wartime bond sales efforts. Read more...
Freedom of Speech was published in the February 20, 1943 Issue of The Saturday Evening Post with a matching essay by Booth Tarkington as part of the Four Freedoms series. Rockwell felt that this and Freedom of Worship were the most successful of the set. Since Rockwell liked to depict life as he experienced it or envisioned it, it is not surprising that this image depicts an actual occurrence. Read more...
The Saturday Evening Post is an American magazine published six times a year. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1963, then every two weeks until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most widely circulated and influential magazines for the American middle class, with fiction, non-fiction, cartoons and features that reached millions of homes every week. The magazine declined in readership through the 1960s, and in 1969 The Saturday Evening Post folded for two years before being revived as a quarterly publication in 1971.
The painting was created in November 1942 and published in the March 6, 1943 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. All of the people in the picture were friends and family of Rockwell in Arlington, Vermont, who were photographed individually and painted into the scene. The work depicts a group of people gathered around a dinner table for a holiday meal. Having been partially created on Thanksgiving Day to depict the celebration, it has become an iconic representation for Americans of the Thanksgiving holiday and family holiday gatherings in general. The Post published Freedom from Want with a corresponding essay by Carlos Bulosan as part of the Four Freedoms series. Despite many who endured sociopolitical hardships abroad, Bulosan's essay spoke on behalf of those enduring the socioeconomic hardships domestically, and it thrust him into prominence. Read more...