Norman Rockwell was a notable American artist and author. His paintings captured the important moments of American culture and its people, including the everyday life of the Boy Scouts of America. He is mostly recognized for his cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post magazine.
Rockwell’s most famous pictures include the Willie Gillis series, the Four Freedoms series, Rosie the Riveter, The Problem We All Live with and Saying Grace.
Background
Ethnicity:
Norman Rockwell’s grandfather named Hill came to the United States from England.
Norman Rockwell was born on February 3, 1894, in New York City, New York, United States. He was the second son of Jarvis Waring Rockwell, an office manager on a cotton textile firm, and Anne Mary Hill.
When Norman was seven, the family moved to Mamaroneck, New York where the boy spent the rest of his childhood. Norman’s parents were devout people that’s why his younger son sang in the church choir. Till the age of ten, Norman spent the summers in the country observing the particularities of its life. Later, this knowledge helped him in some of his canvases.
From an early age, Norman Rockwell revealed his passion for art and drawing. He often sketched with his father, an amateur painter, and visualized the characters from the stories by his favorite author Charles Dickens. Soon, by contrast to his elder brother, Jarvis Waring Rockwell, Jr., who was an athlete, Norman made a strong decision to become an artist.
It must be noted that the artist’s grandfather, Hill, was a landscapist and portraitist from England.
Education
Norman Rockwell combined the studies at the Mamaroneck High School with art classes at the New York School of Art (currently the Parsons School of Design) every Wednesday and Saturday. At the age of fifteen, Rockwell left the high school and became a full-time student of the National Academy of Design. In 1910, he transferred to the Art Students League of New York.
Rockwell was a hardworking student having a good sense of humor. The artist’s fellows dubbed him ‘the Deacon’ for his serious attitude toward classes. The perseverance was often awarded by scholarships.
Among Rockwell’s teachers at the institution were George Bridgman who helped the young man to develop technical skills in drawing and Thomas Fogarty who taught him illustration.
In 1961, Norman Rockwell received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts.
The start of Norman Rockwell’s career can be counted from the first paid commission he received right before his 16th birthday. It was a series of four Christmas cards.
In a couple of years, Rockwell was commissioned to illustrate the book ‘Tell Me Why: Stories about Mother Nature’ by Carl H. Claudy. This time, he worked a lot as a freelance illustrator sending his pictures for such famous youth publications as Saint Nicholas Magazine and Boys' Life magazine issued by the Boy Scouts of America. The editor of the latter was so impressed by Rockwell’s drawings that he accepted him in a magazine as a staff artist. In 1913, Norman Rockwell became an art director of the periodical and occupied the post for three years.
When he was twenty-one, he followed his family on its way to New Rochelle, New York, where he established a studio with another illustrator Victor Clyde Forsythe who worked for The Saturday Evening Post by the time. In May of 1916, Forsythe proposed one of his colleague’s drawing, ‘Mother's Day Off’, for the Post. Once accepted, it marked the beginning of the long and successful collaboration of Rockwell with the periodical. The job boosted the artist’s popularity among many other magazines, including Literary Digest, the Country Gentleman, Leslie's Weekly, Judge, Peoples Popular Monthly and Life magazine, which provided him with more commissions.
When the United States entered the First World War, Norman Rockwell tried to join the navy but wasn’t admitted because of the eight pounds underweight. The young man spent the night to swallow bananas, liquids and doughnuts, and the next day was accepted as a military artist to the camp newspaper within the country. So, he could continue his work for the Post and other periodicals. Rockwell was discharged at the end of the war in 1918.
In the post-war period, the artist tried his hand as an advertising illustrator producing the drawings for Jell-O, Willys cars and Orange Crush soft drinks and other trademarks. He resumed the collaboration with Boys' Life magazine producing a picture for its annual calendar in 1920. He would design it for about the next 50 years. Rockwell’s popularity grew through the decade.
The next ten years are usually considered by art critics as the most prolific period for the artist. He accepted the proposition to illustrate ‘Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn’ book by one of his preferred authors, Mark Twain. At the end of the 1930s, the illustrator moved with his family to Arlington, Vermont where he familiarized with the small-town American life and pursued his painting activity.
The debut solo exhibition of the artist took place in 1941 at the Milwaukee Art Institute.
The Second World War influenced Norman Rockwell’s art. He created the number of the covers related to the conflict, including his well-known ‘Rosie the Riveter’ for the Post. In 1943, inspired by the 1941 speech of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rockwell produced his other famous artwork called ‘Four Freedoms’ series. The paintings were featured in the Saturday Evening Post. They received huge popularity among the public and were reprinted many times.
The same year, the majority of Rockwell’s works, including his collection of costumes, were destroyed by fire in his Arlington studio. The artist made a decision to restart his activity in a new location not far from West Arlington.
After the war, the artist continued to work on his small-cities canvases and illustration. He illustrated books, created pictures to design the commemorative stamps for the Postal Service, produced the posters for the Treasury Department and the military and the greeting cards for Hallmark. He also painted the presidential candidates and Hollywood movie stars. In 1953, the artist moved his family to Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
After the death of his second wife Mary in 1959, the artist left his painting activity for a while and with help of his son Thomas published the autobiography titled ‘My Adventures as an Illustrator’. Some pictures from the book were featured in the Post, including the artist’s ‘Triple Self-portrait’. The long collaboration with the periodical ended in a couple of years by the last cover he created for the magazine. Then, Rockwell joined the staff of Look magazine which he provided with the pictures on civil rights, poverty and exploration of space for the next ten years.
Among the last big projects of the artist were the portraits of the actors from the 1966 movie ‘Stagecoach’ and the cover for the 1968 double album of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. A year later, Norman Rockwell had a retrospective in New York City.
The longest collaboration in Rockwell’s career, this one with the Boy Scouts of America, was over two years before the artist’s death by the last calendar illustration called ‘The Spirit of 1976’.
Norman Rockwell was an extraordinary talented painter who made a great contribution to the development of the American illustration art history.
A prolific artist, he produced more than four hundred artworks, including 323 original covers for The Saturday Evening Post and the great number of socially charged pictures for Life magazine, and illustrated more than forty books during about the seventy years of his career. He portrayed four Presidents of the United States, including Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon, as well as the leaders of other countries, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru. Many movie stars and other influential personalities of the time appeared on his canvases, including Judy Garland and Colonel Sanders.
The contribution the artist made for the Boy Scouts of America by his calendars and other illustrations was marked by the Silver Buffalo Award from the organization. Rockwell was also a recipient of the highest civilian award of the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2008, he received the status of the official state artist of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
His paintings and illustrations were often considered by art experts as too idealistic and sentimental depictions of American culture. The critics of his art even invented a disparaging adjective ‘Rockwellesque’ for that. In contrast, the public loved and still loves his pictures because they are somehow the symbols of the important moments of the American history and of the central values of American people. In 2010, Google placed Rockwell's painting ‘Boy and Girl Gazing at the Moon’ on its home page. That provided the Norman Rockwell Museum by the huge number of visitors that day.
Many of his paintings, in particular his well-known ‘Four Freedoms’ series has been reproduced and copied many times in the modern culture. Another painting, The Problem We All Live With, was shown in the White House in 2011 when that time President Barak Obama met the main personage of the picture, the symbol of Civil Rights, Ruby Bridges.
The representatives from the different fields of the modern culture found and continue to find the inspiration in Norman Rockwell’s art and personality.
Such American movie directors as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have Rockwell's original of ‘The Peach Crop’, and a sketch of the artist’s ‘Triple Self-portrait’ relatively. The 1994 Forrest Gump movie by Robert Zemeckis was strongly inspired in the visual aspect by the views from Rockwell's paintings as it was made with one of the scenes from Empire of the Sun movie of 1987. A popular singer Lana Del Rey featured the name of the artist for her forthcoming sixth studio album, ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’.
At the end of the 1960s, Nornam Rockwell gathered the great number of his paintings and drawings in a custodianship named the Old Corner House Stockbridge Historical Society. Later, it became the Norman Rockwell Museum which nowadays possesses the largest collection of his artworks as well as the important archives of papers on his life and work. In addition, the visitors have a possibility to see Rockwell’s studio with its contents.
Nowadays, the Norman Rockwell Museum organizes regular exhibitions dedicated to the artist and to the American illustration art in general. The presentations are shown in more than 150 museums of the United States and abroad. During the 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement, the audience was extremely interested in Rockwell’s paintings of the period.
Rockwell’s art is also commemorated by many other retrospectives, including the shows at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania and the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The works by Norman Rockwell are highly sought by art collectors. In 2013, a painting by the artist titled ‘Saying Grace’ was purchased at Sotheby's in New York City for $46,085,000.
Norman Rockwell, as his second wife Mary Rhodes Barstow, didn’t attend church regularly. Though, while living in New Rochelle, New York, they were members of the local Saint John's Wilmot Church.
Views
Quotations:
"Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I am a story teller."
"The View of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be."
"I'll never have enough time to paint all the pictures I'd like to."
"The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they're always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back."
Membership
Society of Illustrators
,
United States
a men's literary group in Pittsfield, Massachusetts
Monday Evening Club
,
United States
1961
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Artist, illustrator and author, Norman Rockwell has portrayed the American scene with unrivalled freshness and clarity. Insight, optimism and good humour are the hallmarks of his artistic style. His vivid and affectionate portraits of our country and ourselves have become a beloved part of the American tradition." Gerald Ford, thirty-eight President of the United States
"Steeped in the history and rhetoric of Western painting, Rockwell was a visual storyteller of genius. More than that, he was a story-maker, a bard. He didn’t illustrate Middle America. He invented Middle America." Peter Schjeldahl, American art critic, poet and educator
Interests
Writers
Charles Dickens, Mark Twain
Connections
Norman Rockwell was married three times.
In 1916, his first wife became the model for his ‘Mother Tucking Children into Bed’, Irene O'Connor. The couple broke up in 1930.
The same year, Rockwell met his second spouse, Mary Rhodes Barstow, in Alhambra, California where he came to visit his old friend Clyde Forsythe. Mary and Norman had three sons named Jarvis Waring, Peter and Thomas Rhodes. Thomas Rhodes Rockwell is known as the author of books for children. Mary Rhodes died in 1959 after a heart attack.
Two years later, October 25, Norman Rockwell married for the third time. His last wife was a retired teacher of English Mary Leete Punderson.
Father:
Jarvis Waring Rockwell
Mother:
Anne Mary Hill
Grandfather:
Hill Rockwell
Brother:
Jarvis Waring Rockwell, Jr.
1st spouse:
Irene O'Connor
2nd spouse:
Mary Rhodes Barstow
Norman Rockwell with Mary Barstow.
Son:
Jarvis Waring Rockwell
Son:
Peter Rockwell
Son:
Thomas Rockwell
3d spouse:
Mary Leete Punderson
Norman Rockwell with Mary Punderson.
mentor:
George Bridgman
mentor:
Thomas Fogarty
Friend:
Victor Clyde Forsythe
References
Norman Rockwell's World of Scouting
The book shows Rockwell's sixty-year association with the Boy Scouts of America through his paintings and drawings
Norman Rockwell
The book examines the life and work of the twentieth-century artist Norman Rockwell
2001
The Norman Rockwell Treasury
Thomas S. Buechner, a distinguished former director of the Brooklyn Museum, examines Rockwell’s style, technique, and development, placing him in perspective as an important force in 20th century art
2004
Biography - Norman Rockwell
The illuminating biography uncovers the complicated artist and examines his lasting influence on the nation
2006
Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera
The first book to explore the meticulously composed and richly detailed photographs that Norman Rockwell used to create his famous artworks
2009
Norman Rockwell: 332 Magazine Covers
With commentaries by Christopher Finch, this oversized volume features in full color the famous cover illustrations Rockwell did for the Saturday Evening Post
2013
American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell
The exhibition catalog organized in collaboration with the Norman Rockwell Museum of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, presents well-known and beloved masterpieces by Rockwell
