My Musings: Norman Rockwell Museum

While driving to Vermont from Massachusetts we had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Norman Rockwell Museum. I grew up seeing Rockwell prints often, so his art has a very familiar, nostalgic feel for me and I was so excited to see the originals of some of the prints I had grown up seeing.

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. Norman Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing more than 4,000 original works in his lifetime, 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,

New Kids in the Neighborhood

1967

"New Kids in the Neighborhood was the 3rd of Rockwell's civil rights pictures for Look magazine, illustrating an article about the changing racial profile of America's suburbs.

In his illustration of suburban integration in Chicago's Park Forest community, Rockwell was secure in expressing his philosophy of tolerance. We can see the children will soon be playing with each other, but the face peering from behind a window curtain makes us wonder how the adults will fare."

Girl Reading the Post

1941

"Though they worked in distinctly different realms, Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell regarded each other highly. They were personally acquainted, corresponded regularly, and traded gifts of art and memorabilia. Girl Reading the Post, an original cover illustration for March 1, 1941 issue of The Saturday Evening Post stands as a token of their respect and friendship. In 1943, during a stay in Alhambra, California, his wife Mary’s home town, Rockwell gave Disney the painting, inscribing the work, “To Walt Disney, one of the really great artists, from an admirer, Norman Rockwell.”Upon receipt of Girl Reading the Post, Disney penned his appreciation, saying “I can’t begin to thank you … my entire staff have been traipsing up to my office to look at it … to all of them, you are some sort of god.” To further express his thanks, Disney sent Rockwell a set of ceramic figurines featuring characters from Pinocchio, Bambi and Fantasia.

For years, Girl Reading the Post hung in Disney’s offices, and later, in the home of his daughter, Diane Disney Miller, who was herself a Rockwell model. When Diane was about ten years old, she and her late sister Sharon sat for beautifully-rendered Rockwell portraits. Many years later, she generously donated Girl Reading the Post to the Norman Rockwell Museum."

The Four Freedoms

1943

The Four Freedoms are perhaps Rockwell's most well known paintings. The Four Freedoms refer to Franklin Roosevelt's address to Congress in January 1941, where he articulated his vision for a postwar world founded on four basic human freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. After a lot of thought how best to represent these four ideals, Rockwell had the idea of portraying the freedoms from the perspective of his own hometown experiences using everyday, simple scenes such as his own town meeting used in his Freedom of Speech painting.

These paintings are gorgeous and speak volumes, the way they are displayed in the museum is powerful.

Freedom of Religion

Freedom of Speech

Freedom From Fear

Freedom From Want

(The original oil painting of this freedom was traveling, so we got to see a print of it was that was signed by Rockwell.)

Golden Rule

1961

"I’d been reading up on comparative religion. The thing is that all major religions have the Golden Rule in Common. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Not always the same words but the same meaning."

– Norman Rockwell

"In preparing to paint this 1961 Saturday Evening Post cover, Norman Rockwell noted that many countries, cultures, and religions incorporate some version of the Golden Rule into their belief systems. “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You” is a simple but universal phrase that reflected Rockwell’s personal philosophy. A gathering of people from different cultures, religions, and ethnicities, this image was a precursor of the socially conscious subjects that Rockwell would illustrate in the 1960s and 1970s. Rockwell was a compassionate man, and this simple phrase reflected his philosophy."

This was my favorite painting in the whole museum, it is unbelievably stunning and gorgeous in person. And the message behind it is one of peace, acceptance, and kindness which makes the piece all the more beautiful.

Boy and Girl Gazing at the Moon (Puppy Love)

1926

"Life’s simple pleasures and the blush of first love are the focus of Norman Rockwell’s 1926 “Saturday Evening Post” cover, which portrays a young couple entranced by the moon, and by each other’s company. Their rickety wooden seating bends under their weight but does not deter them from their reverie, for they are taking time to enjoy the moment.

In 1926, Rockwell had already been working for “The Saturday Evening Post” for ten years. A self-proclaimed specialist in painting child-centered scenes, he elevated the status of his youthful subjects by portraying them as complex individuals with dignity, despite their economic status."

Stained Glass Window

1960

Norman Rockwell first witnessed this scene during a trip to London. In Westminister Abbey, Rockwell saw a workman high on a scaffold working to repair one of the beautiful windows.

In 1960, when Rockwell decided to bring that memory to life, he experienced difficulty capturing the luminosity of the stained glass window. The scene in the window is the Resurrection, a fitting composition for the 1960 Easter edition of The Post. Easter was on Sunday April 17 in 1960. The original scene showed the angels lifting Christ into the heavens, but Rockwell opted to substitute the Cross into the picture instead. Rockwell was finally able to capture the translucent radiance of the window thanks to his attention to detail

The Runaway

1958

"I like to paint kids... people think of their own youth," Rockwell once said and he had first hand experience as reference for this work. "I ran away from home when I was a kid in Mamaroneck and mooned around the shore; kicking stones and watching the whitecaps on Long Island Sound. Pretty soon it began to get dark and a cold wind sprang up and moaned in the trees. So I went home."

- Norman Rockwell

Before the Shot

1958

Family Tree

1959

"To simulate the appearance of aged parchment, Rockwell stained the background of his painting with brown paint and sketched in trompe l'oeil cracks. For even greater authenticity he rubbed dirt, gravel and twigs into it, shook it off, then rubbed in more. He then sandpapered the surface, which he said gave it a "beautiful texture." The consistency of family features through the generations is assured by Rockwell's use of the same model for either the man or the woman in each couple on the tree.

The lineage begins with a pirate and a Spanish princess, taken by the pirate from a sinking Spanish galleon. The galleon is based on a painting by Rockwell's favorite illustrator of historical subjects, Howard Pyle, whose initials are on the treasure chest.

Rockwell loved the idea of having the "all-American" boy descend from a pirate and his stolen Spanish princess, though it troubled his friend and therapist Erik Erikson. "Do you think you ought to start off the family with him, a cutthroat, a barbarian?" Erikson asked. Rockwell experimented with changing the pirate to a Puritan, then a buccaneer, but finally returned to the original. "Everybody," he said, "had a horse thief or two in his family."

Marriage License

1955

"The promise of love was a theme that Rockwell continued to explore throughout his long career. Among these reflections was Marriage License, his popular June 11, 1955 cover for The Saturday Evening Post. In the painting, it is late afternoon on a Saturday, and a disinterested clerk has already put his boots on in the hope of going home. Couples in love are a humdrum regularity in his town hall office, but by contrast, an excited young couple is happily filling out the paperwork for their marriage license, a momentous occasion that they are not inclined to rush. In fact, this real life couple, Joan Lahart and Francis Mahoney, of nearby Lee, Massachusetts, were actually engaged to be married. Of the handsome groom-to-be, Rockwell said, "You know, this is a portrait of myself. At least that is what I would have liked to look like if I had had the opportunity."

Day in the Life of a Little Girl

1952

Christmas Homecoming

1948

The painting could actually almost be called Rockwell Family Homecoming, because the whole family appears in the painting. This painting shows Rockwell's son Jarvis, or Jerry as he was called by the family, coming home from college for Christmas holiday. Jarvis is being given a great big motherly hug by his mother, Mary Barstow Rockwell. On the next row back in the crowd of spectators, on the left, is Rockwell's son, Thomas, or Tommy. On the far left side of the painting, wearing glasses is Peter Rockwell, Norman and Mary's youngest son. Of course, to the right of Jarvis, smoking his trademark pipe tobacco, is the artist himself, Norman Rockwell.

Norman Rockwell received the Presidential Medal of Freedom

in 1977, President Gerald R. Ford honored Rockwell with the medal, for his "vivid and affectionate portraits of our country." Rockwell received the medal, the nation's highest peacetime award, for having portrayed "the American scene with unrivaled freshness and clarity," and with "insight, optimism and good humor."

After touring through the first floor of the museum, we took a little break to visit Rockwell's studio that had originally been in his backyard on South Street in Stockbridge. Later in his life, Rockwell left the studio and its contents to the Norman Rockwell Museum, the building was cut in two and moved to the museum grounds and is just a short walk from the museum itself.

During his career, Norman Rockwell occupied approximately twenty studios, and each of them was arranged in a similar manner. Unlike the stereotypical disheveled artist’s studio, Rockwell’s were always neat and organized. His creativity and prolific production seemed to depend on a physical environment of tidy organization.

This installation of the workspace that Rockwell considered his “best studio yet”, the Stockbridge studio, invites viewers to enter into a day in his profoundly busy work life, and to ponder the aesthetic and practical concerns that informed the artist’s imagery and experience.

After touring through Rockwell's tidy and organized studio, we headed back to the museum to explore the second floor, which is devoted to the the covers of the Saturday Evening Post that Rockwell created.

In the minds of many people, The Saturday Evening Post and Norman Rockwell are synonymous. Americans, who lived through the rapid growth and change of the twentieth century, view the Rockwell covers as an identifiable and comfortable image of their life in the United States.

At the start of his career, Norman Rockwell’s secret ambition was to have his work published on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. He viewed the Post as the greatest show window in America for an illustrator. Rockwell’s career with the Post lasted 47 years during which he created 322 cover designs.

After coming up with a concept for a painting (he was almost always commissioned by magazines and ad agencies), Rockwell would enlist the help of a photographer (he rotated between a group of them) to turn that idea into a photo. The subjects in the photos were his friends and neighbors.

Once the photograph was made, Rockwell then used his artistic talents combined with simple tracing to translate that photograph into the painting he had in mind. Rockwell never painted freehand.