Rockwell sold America itself on magazine covers for decades
Norman Percevel Rockwell, 3 February 1894 to 8 November 1978, painted more than four thousand works and 322 Saturday Evening Post covers across forty-seven years. Critics called him kitsch; Look-magazine pictures of Ruby Bridges later forced a second look at the illustrator label he accepted.
Harlem-born to Jarvis and Anne Mary Rockwell, he left high school for Chase Art School at fourteen, then the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League under Thomas Fogarty, George Bridgman, and Frank Vincent DuMond. By nineteen he was art editor of Boys' Life, earning fifty dollars a month for a cover plus story art. A New Rochelle studio shared with cartoonist Clyde Forsythe led to his first Post hit, Boy with Baby Carriage, on 20 May 1916.
World War I almost barred him from the Navy for being eight pounds under a six-foot frame's minimum; a night of bananas and doughnuts fixed the scale, and he served as a military artist without combat. In 1943 he spent seven months and fifteen pounds on the Four Freedoms—Speech, Worship, Want, and Fear—after Franklin Roosevelt's rights speech, publishing them in the Post with Maine shipbuilders among the models. A studio fire that year wiped costumes and props, splitting his career into a modern-dress second act.
He left the Post in 1963 after nearly five decades and spent a decade at Look on civil rights, poverty, and space. The Problem We All Live With (1964) shows Ruby Bridges walking to school between federal marshals past racist graffiti; it hung in the White House when Bridges met Barack Obama in 2011. Portraits ranged from Eisenhower and Kennedy to Nasser, Nehru, Judy Garland, and a 1973 Colonel Sanders. Serious painters sniffed; the public never stopped buying the dream.
Source: Norman Rockwell
