Norman Perceval Rockwell was born on Feb. 3, 1894 in New York, New York. As a boy he grew fond of the country, where he moved to a few years after he was born, and stayed away from the city as much as he could, which would later be shown in his works (Buechner, Retrospective, 24).
When he was 14, he had to commute to New York City twice a week to attend the Chase School of Fine and Applied Art. After awhile he dropped out of his sophomore year of high school, and became a full time student at The National Academy School (Buechner, Artist, 38).
He illustrated his first Saturday Evening Post cover on May 20, 1916, which was his first big break.
Norman Rockwell says, “If one wants to paint covers for the Post, one must begin by accepting certain limitations. The cover must please a vast number (no matter how: by amusing, edifying, praising; but it must please); it must not require an explanation or caption to be understood; it must have an instantaneous impact (people won’t bother to puzzle out a cover’s meaning) ” (The Norman Rockwell Album, 29).
More people have seen Rockwell’s work, mostly on the covers on the widely circulated Saturday Evening Post, more than all of Michelangelo’s, Rembrandt’s, and Picasso’s put together, estimated by Life magazine (Walton 7).
Rockwell creates his pictures in separate stages. First he makes a loose rough draft of his idea. Second, he gathers costumes, props and models.
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Rockwell’s models are usually his friends, because he knows them and likes them (Walton 16).
Later on in Rockwell’s lifetime he would stray away from using real models, he would use photographs to do this step instead. He would take either sketches or pictures and then paint them onto canvas. Next he draws individual parts of the picture.
Fourth, he would sketch the whole drawing in great detail. Fifth, he would put color into his sketches, and sixth he would put all the parts together into the final painting (Buechner, Artist, 44).
Rockwell used foreground invitation in many of his works. Foreground invitation means that the picture suggests that the viewer is entering the picture and into the scene. Valentine, 3 Rockwell’s subject matter is average America. For his first 30 years, he painted scenes of the country, childhood embarrassments, discomforts and humiliations (Buechner, Retrospective, 44).
He also painted for advertisements during his this period. For example Fisk Bicycle Tires and Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. During the twenties, Rockwell became rich and famous. He became the top cover artist for the Saturday Evening Post which his work appeared almost every month. During the twenties, he also took on more advertising jobs, at twice the fee of a Saturday Evening Post cover (Buechner, Retrospective, 46).
During his appearances on the Post during the twenties, he introduced many new subjects, and several characters that would reappear which where bums, sheriffs, musicians and doctors (Buechner, Retrospective, 52).
1935 to 1939 were the years when Rockwell’s finest art was done (Buechner, Retrospective, 61).
Rockwell had stopped using real models and started to turn more toward photographs. This helped him to create a more life like subject because the photograph stays still, a model tends to turn around. He produced sixty-seven Saturday Evening Post covers during the thirties, far less than he did in the twenties but more than any other artist. His most important works of this time was an 8 piece color set for Huckleberry Finn in 1935.
Rockwell took this job with enthusiasm because he had a chance to participate in the tradition to illustrate different scenes in classical works, not stories he made up on his own (Buechner, Retrospective, 75).
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Rockwell’s art was a big part of the war effort in the forties. A series of paintings called the Four Freedoms explained what the war effort was all about. These pictures (Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Fear, Freedom of Worship, and Freedom from Want) were toured in sixteen select cities and were seen by 1, 222, 000 people and used in selling $132, 999, 537 worth of war bonds (Buechner, Artist, 161).
Rockwell also praised the efforts of women during the war in his paintings. In his Saturday Evening Post cover titled “Rosie the Riveter”, Rosie (as indicated on her lunch box) sits in a pose of the Valentine, 4 prophet Isaiah (created by Michelangelo in his Sistine chapel painting).
This pose portrays the power of women who have filled in for the men in heavy industry jobs (Meyer, 42).
Rockwell also made many Army recruiting posters, to recruit younger peoples to the armed forces. After the war to his death Rockwell painted all sorts of subjects. He painted every single presidential candidate, starting with Eisenhower. He painted scenes of space exploration, more specifically, Apollo 11 landing on the moon.
He painted one of the most famous self-portraits during this time. Called “Triple self-portrait”, it shows Rockwell painting a much younger self while looking into a mirror of his older self. Rockwell even painted social problems of that time including segregation. In “The Problem We All Live With”, a little African-American girl is being escorted into school by four United States Marshals while the little girl has tomatoes being thrown at her. Rockwell’s art has clearly became the most recognizable art in America’s time. Rockwell’s art brought the America people as a whole together to reminisce of the early stages of childhood innocents, he told us the idealistic American Dream was and he persuaded us as a country to fight for what is right and protect our freedoms that our ancestors fought so hard for during World War II.
Norman Rockwell had a style uniquely his own, his illustrations looking so real at times, that it looks like he had just photographed the image onto canvas. His style was so simple but told you everything you needed to know, this defined American art perfectly. This style was seen for the work he did in the Saturday Evening Post and different advertisements thorough his life. His work will be remembered always. 1. ) Buechner, Thomas S.
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The War of Freedom of Expression 'Taking on anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers in the sanctified courtroom environment is like responding to someone who calls your mother a prostitute. By defending you raise the question that maybe she really was' Anonymous source drawn from We iman and Win, 1986. The right to freedom of expression can be described as a war. It is a war that has lasted for ...
Norman Rockwell A Sixty Year Retrospective. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. , 1972 2.
) Buechner, Thomas S. Norman Rockwell Artist and Illustrator. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. , 1970 3.
) Rockwell, Norman The Norman Rockwell Album. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc. , 1961 4. ) Walton, Donald A Rockwell Portrait. Kansas City: Speed Andrews and McMeel Inc. , 1978 5.
) Meyer, Susan E. Norman Rockwell’s World War II Impressions From the Homefront. USAA foundation, 1991.
